1500 Words

Moving Day Part 2

2006-10-30T21:35:00.000-05:00

The HP claims that there is no link to the new site in Moving Day #1. I have a link when I look at that post, but just to be on the safe side, here it is again: Tell It To COACHIE.

Moving Day

2006-10-24T22:36:00.000-04:00

Hello everyone! You were warned that this day was coming, and now I've got my new site up and running. Actually, it's up, but not fully running. If you click on the tabs that say "about" or "links" or "here" you'll find nothing, but I'm working on it. What happened was that while I was experimenting to see whether I could move everything here to the new site, I jumped the gun, and moved everything before I was ready. Now I've had to publish at both places to keep this one running and the other one up to date. Those extra mouse clicks are like spinning plates that I just can't run between any more.

I named this site 1500 words because I was trying to push myself to write a lot. Now that I've got the 2 blogs, 1500 words seems too long to write and usually too long to read. So I'm coming out from under that label so I can post as little or as much as I want at the new place without the title looking down and tsk-tsking at me. The Entropy Three will continue in its same spot.

Another advantage of the new site is the categories so all of my stuff can be filed away and if you are desperate to reread the post about when I cut the lawn, it will be easier to find.

For those of you that registered here to comment, I apologize that you'll probably have to reregister at the new site. This site will remain here too, because I'm too busy (lazy) to redo all of the links and because not all of the pictures transferred.

The challenges of learning to design the web page continue (like that font change in the middle of the post, don't even know where to begin fixing that), but hopefully it will be adequate for now. Anyway, thanks for reading and now I hope you'll click here to see the new site.

A Short Recap of the Amazing Race

2006-10-22T21:48:00.000-04:00

I'm too tired to go on at length with how pleased I am that Peter and Sarah are done for the season. They were so annoying that they almost drove me to Extreme Home Makeover (and that show has way too much emotion to watch on a regular basis). As a public service to those of you who don't watch The Amazing Race here's a little recap of Peter's performance this season:

Early in the race: "I just love, love, love my one-legged girlfriend."

Middle of the race: "My one-legged girlfriend is so slow and annoying."

End of the race: "I think my one-legged girlfriend and I will probably just be friends."

After Sarah tells Phil that Peter is not nurturing or kind: "How dare my one-legged girlfriend speak that way to me! I am going to f#$%&ng kill my one-legged girlfriend."

And if you freeze frame that scene, you can see it all over his face.

A Sticky Wicket (Caused by a Cricket)

2006-10-21T23:18:00.000-04:00

I have previously remarked that I am willing to live with the crickets that cohabitate with us, provided that they stay in the closets. This has not always been a great arrangement; especially that time when I put my bare foot into a shoe containing cricket remains. The main problem I have with our crickets is that they are really, really slow. When faced with certain demise under a shoe or magazine, they just sit there. Usually I will try to nudge them toward the closet or behind a piece of furniture, but half the time I end up breaking one or more of their legs.

I recently decided that possibly the crickets appear in the middle of the floor because they are ready to die, perhaps of starvation. I have no idea what crickets eat, although I could probably name five or six things that eat crickets, including people in Korea if I remember correctly. I decided to ask the internet what crickets eat, to determine whether or not they are finding food in my closets. I’ll admit that I was also eager to confirm that they do not dine on mouse droppings or cockroaches or human remains or other things that I’m assuming are not in my closets.

While information on what crickets eat was rather hard to find, I did learn this information from Wikipedia:

Um, what?

As it turns out, according to ezine articles:

So, I’m going to go with that last bit - that I’ve got squeaky clean closets and a crazy sect of cannibalistic crickets on my hands. The ones that come out into the open to die are obviously wracked with guilt over their lifestyle or weak from spending so much time in hiding from the more aggressive ones. All of that is fine with me. If the crickets need to work out their demons in the middle of my dining room floor, I’ll give them space.

What I will not tolerate, however, is their new trick of lurking in the toilet. Another interesting bit in the ezine article was: “Crickets also need a good supply of water. However, keep the water away from the food to keep the food dry and fresh. Insert cotton swabs into the water vessel to prevent the crickets from drowning.” Clearly they are not good swimmers, so why would they choose the toilet as a new hang out? Three times in the past month I have found rather large crickets perched inside the toilet bowl. Each time I gasped, shuddered, and flushed them down because bugs are gross enough without rescuing them from places of questionable cleanliness (want to come visit me?). They put on rather a dramatic show as they circle the bowl, first fighting against the pull and then almost shrugging as their thin little legs start to swirl around them with the force of the water.

I guess bugs in the toilet would not prompt most people to write an essay. Unfortunately, my repeated encounters with the crickets have brought to the forefront of my mind a horrifying story that my friend John told me in college. Apparently, one afternoon when his mother was using the bathroom, a rat came up out of the toilet. He said after that day she always kept a teakettle full of water on top of the toilet lid, in case anything else ever tried to come in that way. Honestly, since this was a true incident (and if you saw how he gave a little laugh and shook his head and said “my poor mother” you’d believe him too) and not an urban legend, for the past 20 years I have been uneasy that such a thing could happen. (Not to mention all those news stories about snakes in the plumbing). More times than I care to admit, I have glanced down into the bowl and inspected the pipes behind it and wondered if a creature could make it into my bathroom. I think that fear is a main reason that I am so quickly in and out of the bathroom at bars and parties.

And so the crickets will not earn any sympathy from me. Maybe they are thirsty, maybe they are hiding from their cannibalistic friends, maybe they are just looking for a way to die. But as long as there is even the slightest possibility that something that would like to eat a cricket is lurking in my plumbing and looking for a reason to surface, the crickets will be destroyed quickly and without remorse.

Caution: This One is Depressing

2006-10-20T22:35:00.000-04:00

Somehow yesterday I stumbled upon this article about the shootings of the little Amish girls in September. I couldn't get to the New York Times article it referenced (because it costs money and I'm in favor of a free press), but I did read this article which contained excerpts of the New York Times article. While the Pennsylvania police went out of their way to emphasize that the school was "a target of opportunity" and that the gunman probably did not have anything against the Amish, the author of the Times article, Bob Hebert, describes the attack as a hate crime because one group was singled out for terror: little girls.

Hebert states that the lack of in-depth media response, extensive coverage, or outrage was due to the fact that the victims were

Maybe he is right, I never considered that point of view. I assumed the toned-down coverage had something to do with trying not to exploit the Amish or because it didn't happen in Aruba, but maybe it was because it was "familiar news". Honestly, I didn't care that the lifespan of that story was short and that the details were spotty. Not because I didn't care about the victims and their families, but because I have lost all hope that there is anything that can be done about it.

What solutions could possibly be proposed? Better gun control? That could never happen, regardless of the opinions of average Americans. Cozying up to parents trying to protect their kids does not bring financial rewards. Why would an elected official listen to us when the NRA is available with open checkbooks? More security at the schools? Obviously the Amish are not going to install metal detectors, and even if they had them, this attack would have likely transpired in exactly the same way. Since the Amish problems had no easy solution, the discussion of school safety seemed to die even quicker than the story of the shootings. Our kiddies had a "stranger danger" drill shortly after the incident, but if someone was determined to harm kids at that school, he'd likely gain some measure of success. A politician can find no money in upgrading school safety, and no money for upgrading school safety, because all of it is getting kicked back through tax cuts.

If I had to pick an overwhelming emotion for the past year, it wouldn't be sadness or loneliness or even anxiety, although I've had my share of all three. What I feel most often is helplessness. What happens in Washington never intersects with what goes on in my life. Articles like this and this and this and this only reinforce my feeling that our elected officials are not only unconcerned with the problems of average Americans, but contemptuous of us. They think we're stupid. Politicians assume that if they tell us the problems we see with our own eyes aren't there or that solutions are coming, then we'll believe them.

I used to have some hope that in November, if Congress changed hands, something might improve, but I don't feel that way anymore. After John McCain signed off on terror, I finally admitted to myself that politics is only about the power. I have bored my family with this sentiment before, but to me, God spoke right to John McCain and said, "You know what happened to you. You can keep it from happening to someone else. What are you going to do about it?" And John McCain answered, "I can't worry about that now. I'm trying to get elected president."

While I have always been an optimistic and idealistic person, now it is obvious even to me that politicians will do anything to get power and then hold onto it, regardless of their rhetoric or intentions on the way in. Even with the internet and blogs and all the mainstream and fringe news, no one is accountable. The average voters will never find out whether their congressperson actually tried to do what he/she promised. The motivation to fulfill the wishes of the voters probably evaporates quickly.

And so the sad conclusion of my train of thought from yesterday is: I realize that I can't waste any more hope on politics and I'm out of optimism for the future of the country. I have to narrow my focus to my own family and find my happiness and hopefulness there. Luckily, the kiddies are smart and cheerful and optimistic(and cute). Maybe someday they'll find a way to change the things that the HP and I must protect them from now.

Would You Really Read an Entire Post about My Dinner?

2006-10-16T22:51:00.000-04:00

Earlier tonight, while preparing my dinner, I pulled the wine bag out of the wine box that I bought on September 21. This is a time honored family tradition of diligently pursuing every last drop of the bulk wine in the refrigerator, because really, there are starving people in China who would love that last 3/4 ounce and what’s the point of buying cheap wine if you are not going to consume it all and realize the greatest possible ratio of ounces to dollars? I straightened the bag back into a square, held it by the top corner so that any remaining wine would collect down by the spout, and positioned it over my glass.

Then I noticed some brown spots under the clear plastic that surrounds the spout. I know that alcohol isn’t normally considered a “growing medium,” (particularly by the HP who sees it as an especially effective antibiotic) but what other explanation could there be? I had to conclude, given the advanced age of the box and the lack of any other explanation, that some sort of mold was growing around the spout (note to self: drink more/faster). So against everything that I believe and everything I have been taught, I threw out the end of the wine.

Fortunately, having had a short stint as a brownie/girl scout, I was prepared and had a bottle of Kendall-Jackson Sauvignon Blanc that had been chilling away in the refrigerator since late September. I got my handy Screwpull foil cutter (probably one of the most useful tools in my kitchen and an item that everyone should have) and took the top off the cork.

But it wasn’t a cork. It was a plastic “cork.” The kind those Australians use. The HP and I both read an article years ago about how the advent of the plastic cork has caused heartache and woe for the Portuguese cork farmers (but now everyone wants cork floors, so I’m going to assume those guys are back in business). The farmers were so down on their luck that the European Union declared that plastic corks were not allowed for European wine. Whenever we see a plastic cork we always lament the poor cork farmers (and then drink until we’ve forgotten all about them).

Since the HP left, I have been talking to myself more, or saying things in my head that I would normally say out loud if I had someone nearby to say them to. And so, when I saw the plastic cork, I thought to myself “Well, well, well, look who’s gone to the plastic cork now.” This is in fact, a quote and exactly what the HP would have said if he’d been here, so I don’t know if I was actually talking to myself or listening to a hallucination. In any event, the cork answered me.

I know. It seems unlikely that a cork would answer to my unspoken thoughts. Some of you may be ready to pick up the phone and demand to know exactly how many bottles of Kendall-Jackson Sauvignon Blanc I had opened and emptied before the cork talked back. But it answered me before I even had a sip. Here’s what it said:

(It says “I selected this cork to ensure the highest wine quality – Jess S. Jackson” and although I took more than 15 pictures of the cork (no, I only had the one glass) I can’t produce a readable one. I don’t know if this is a limitation of my capabilities or the camera’s, but I will admit that Sony is a lot more successful than I am).

Is this evidence of a guilty conscience? A nod to the wine traditionalists who crave the thrill of trying to determine if the cork has turned moldy and spoiled the wine? A preemptive strike against people who like real cork because they like the little chunks it leaves in the bottle? I don't know the true motivation, but I imagine there is a vintner on a therapist couch somewhere trying to reconcile these possibilities.

The wine was entirely necessary to sit alongside my dinner.

This may look like takeout from a fine Chinese restaurant, but it came from my freezer, courtesy of my big brother (who may be the nicest person on the planet) and Home Bistro (who may be my new BFF). I’ll admit I felt a bit like an astronaut boiling up all these plastic bags (sheesh, of course I know as well as you do that boiling water in outer space would not be hot enough to heat the food – I’m just trying to say the whole thing seemed rather “space age”), but when all the food was liberated from the plastic, it looked and tasted delicious – with no obvious reference points to its former life in the freezer.

Well, it needed one addition.

But it was some good eats.

Cracking Up in the Kitchen

2006-10-12T22:14:00.000-04:00

When Aislinn was little, younger than 2, I used to carry her around the kitchen with me and explain all the steps of constructing her cheese omelet. Since she was an early and prolific talker, it wasn't long before she took charge of the task, telling me what we needed and how to put everything together. When she got bigger and her hand-eye coordination improved, we would make muffins together. At first she was in charge of putting the papers into the muffin cups. Eventually she moved on to pouring the milk in, and after a while she was even allowed to crack the egg. Without fail, she would gently tap the egg on the side of the bowl or on the counter, carefully put her fingers near the crack to open the egg, and then throw the whole thing, shell and all, into the bowl. Given her extensive exposure to the proper cracking of eggs during the omelet phase, I couldn't understand why she always threw the shell in.

Lauren never liked eggs, but she did like to do everything that Aislinn did, so eventually she started helping with the muffins. She was not one to stay occupied with the paper cups and the muffin tin. In fact, in a rather famous episode from her babyhood, when she was 15 months old she waited until my mother had left the room and then climbed up a step stool to get the spoon from the muffin batter and then back down to try to get the batter into her muffin tin on the floor. She was always very interested in using a spoon handle to level off a cup of flour, and she was quite precise when pouring liquids into the batter. However, when she finally moved up to eggs, she did the same thing as her sister - carefully performing every step of careful egg cracking, and then tossing the whole thing, shell and all, into the bowl.

When poor Marty finally came along, the eggs had been removed from the recipe on the muffin mix bag. Now all the muffins need is some water or milk, which is no fun for the kiddies and probably the reason why they don't eat many muffins anymore. Technically, I suppose the change in the muffin mix is meant to be a convenience, but in reality it is an annoyance. Now, if I want to cook with the kiddies, I have to go the whole nine yards with muffins from scratch, and rarely do I have the energy for that.

As a result, Marty never gets to cook much. When we make muffins on the weekend, he has to split the job with both girls, and they already know what the fun things are, so he is usually left dumping spices and baking powder from the measuring spoons or whining for a chance to get on the step stool and mix something. So this morning, I asked Marty if he wanted to help me make some cookies. I felt bad that he was so far behind in his culinary training just because his sisters are bigger and the muffin mix has been dumbed down.

The first words out of his mouth? Do these cookies need eggs? I told him that we needed three eggs, but first we needed to get some other stuff together. He was unimpressed with the sifter, he had no interest in adding the butter and sugar, he couldn’t have cared less about weighing the chocolate chips (although he did scurry down to eat the one that fell on the floor). What he wanted to know was: how many eggs we needed, where they were, and if he could crack them.

Finally, egg time arrived, I handed him the egg and a small plastic bowl (it only took 3 kids and 300 rounds of muffins, but I finally realized that maybe I shouldn’t let them toss the egg directly into the batter). He tapped the egg on the bowl to no avail, so I showed him how to tap it on the table. When he finally managed to crack it, he put his fingers through the crack, and when the egg started to pour out, he tossed the whole thing, shell and all, into the plastic bowl. Unfortunately the recipe called for three eggs, so we had to go through the following sequence 3 times:

He really was a lot of fun to cook with, and even though his sisters always do the fun jobs, obviously he has been paying attention and waiting for his turn to star in the production and crack and throw the eggs. The girls never made up songs or complicated dance moves on the step stool, so I guess he has found a way to personalize his experience.

Every day Lauren tries harder to be like Aislinn and Marty tries harder to be like Lauren and Aislinn. Today it occurred to me that they learn so much from each other that sometimes I slack off on my job of showing them new things. In all of the craziness of our household at the moment, I forget that I can teach them a thing or two, and that I might be surprised with what they can teach me.

But an egg cracking tutorial is in order for all concerned.

Tired

2006-10-05T21:58:00.000-04:00

The HP claims that he suffers from intermittent agoraphobia. It usually flares up on the weekend when we have errands to run but there is football on TV. In his case it is not so much fear of the marketplace as couch-o-philia. However, yesterday I realized how relaxing a short case of agoraphobia might be (maybe Campbell Scott was right).

One day this summer while my brother was washing my car (when he offered, I realized that I had been relying on the rain to keep it clean for seven months. When he was done, I realized that I have a gold car, not a tan one), he told me that I should get new tires before the winter. When the HP was home and took a look, he agreed, and I know somewhere in Afghanistan there is a post-it note with “Ask Shannon about the tires” on it. He tries to nonchalantly work it into conversation sometimes, but I know he is never nonchalant. I also had a mental post-it note to get new tires, but I hadn’t gotten around to it (and hey, it wasn’t winter yet) until the other day when a most bizarre light came on in the dash of my car. It was most of a circle with a wavy line at the bottom and two tiny arrows inside the circle pointing toward a dot in the center. It looked like something that might pop up on an episode of Lost, but when I looked it up in the book, I found that it is actually somehow a signal for low tire pressure.

This development prompted me, finally, to look at the tires. The tires were, how shall I put this, Kojakified. There was almost no tread on the outer three inches, and while I’m no mechanic, I figured that was probably bad. The next day I dumped the crying Marty saddy boy at hourly care and took the car to Sears for tires. I pulled into the door that said “ENTER HERE FOR TIRES, OIL CHANGES, BRAKES. EXPRESS SERVICE!!! COME RIGHT IN AND PARK YOUR CAR RIGHT HERE!! EXPRESS SERVICE!!! EXPRESS SERVICE!!! WE SWEAR TO YOU THAT WE WANT YOU TO COME THROUGH THIS DOOR WITH YOUR CAR!!!” and nothing happened. No one came out to provide me express service, so I finally shut the car off and walked through the waiting room into the autoparts center to be checked in.

Thirty minutes later, I was still standing there (literally) waiting to be checked in. At one desk was a woman who had spent an entire 30 minutes hemming and hawing over the price of her tires. First she wanted the warranties checked, then she insisted that her current tires were more recent than what was in the computer (uh, they can look at the tires and tell when they’re from lady), then she somehow made up her mind to buy three tires, but then she wanted the guy to check what the difference would be if she bought four tires, and did she really need the alignment and balance, and I have to say I’m probably not the only one in the room who wanted to grab her by the ponytail and bang her head on the counter. The guy on the other side made his way through three customers, one of which cut in front of me, which pissed me off, but he had only come in a few seconds after me and he had to go to the dentist so while steam was coming out of my ears, I wasn’t actually seeing red at that point.

Then a mechanic came in to find out whose car was blocking the entrance. My car of course. I briefly considered asking why the sign begs you to come in that way when they don’t want you to, but instead I handed him my keys. I think he had expected me to go move it, but obviously, that was not happening.

Then jackass extraordinaire walked in. He asked me which guy I was waiting for and I said, “I’m next, whichever one finishes first,” but before I even got that out he had walked away, because he had obviously decided that he was going to cut the line too. He strolled over to look in the waiting room, and just as the annoying pony tail lady left, he went right to the counter and started with “Hey man, how ya doing.” At this point, I said in my most annoyed-and-there-will-be-a-scene-if-you-attempt-to-cut-the-line voice “Excuse me…” This got the attention of both men behind the counter who immediately looked up and said “She was next, she’s been waiting, we’re sorry ma’am, thank you for waiting so patiently, etc., etc., etc.” And the jackass extraordinaire said “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s why I asked you which one you were waiting for,” a comment that I ignored because obviously he didn’t care which guy I was waiting for. He figured a woman in an auto parts store can be pushed aside. He wouldn’t have tried that at McDonalds or waiting to buy shoes, but somehow he figured I must be intimidated by my surroundings, so he’d be able to blow right by me.

As a reward for not dickering over the price of two versus three versus four tires and not causing a scene with jackass extraordinaire, the Sears guy bumped my car to the front of the line and said it would be done about an hour sooner than he had estimated for everyone else. But then he asked me where my car was. I had no idea. I said, “the mechanic with the hat and the glasses moved it.” He gave a big sigh, which undid the small bit of goodwill he had won back from me by moving me up in the line. Finally, I full 45 minutes after I walked in for my express check-in, I left the check-in counter. I made my way through Sears where a number of overly cheerful and clearly bored salespeople attempted to sell me a refrigerator. I tried to smile and dismiss them with an “I rent,” but they kept shouting to me as I speedwalked away. What is wrong with these people?

In the mall, I realized that the Sears employees are people who are not quite annoying enough to work at the kiosks that run down the center of the mall halls. I never go to our local mall, so I was wandering around a little bit, but no matter how many times you walk by those kiosks, the nimrods working there will throw their spiel at you. The worst one was some guy whose line was “Can I ask you a question?” I said “I’m in a hurry,” and kept going. I don’t know what he was selling, but I think it had to do with fingernails. The second time I walked by, his little girlfriend cohort came over and said “Can I ask you a question?”

Annoying kiosk workers, can I ask you a question? By walking through the corridors of a mall have I somehow implicitly agreed to be harassed? If I am clearly trying to avoid you, why do you think it is okay to come hassle me? Do you think you have such charm, that somehow a person who wants nothing to do with you will not only stop and chat with you but buy your crap?

I was so annoyed I considered leaving through one of the department stores and walking through the parking lot to another part of the mall, but then I came up with a better idea. The final two times I approached their area (hey, I said I don’t go to that mall much, I was lost), I stopped, pulled out my cellphone and put it up to my ear. I didn’t care if they saw me, I hoped that they did (I’ve told you before, I’m a bad ass) and as soon as I passed them, I put it away. I’m happy to report that so far, they are not pestering people on the phone, but I’m sure that day is coming.

And that will be the day that I settle in on the couch with the HP for a beer, some football, and a case of agoraphobia.

Rip Van Winkle

2006-10-03T23:16:00.000-04:00

HeardyoumissedmeI'mback.

When the new television season started, I was really hoping that I would find a new show (or two, or ten) to watch, since I am down to The Amazing Race, Lost, and Project Runway which is about to end. Although I’m a college graduate, somehow the TV listings remain a mystery to me. I can never remember what is on when, or what that new show I wanted to watch is called. Usually, I depend on commercials to remind me when something is coming on, but the less TV I watch, the fewer commercials I see, and the vicious cycle continues. So instead of trying to decipher the TV guide, each night I spend a while surfing through the networks, trying to see if anything I’ve read about or anything remotely interesting is on. However, my remote seems to change not only the TV channel, but whole parts of the space/time continuum. Don’t believe me? Consider this:

In 1992, when I was young and single, the movie Singles came out. I was moderately obsessed with that movie even though I found most of the people in it rather irritating. The main characters, Kyra Sedgwick and Campbell Scott bothered me the most, so I’m not sure why I kept watching it over and over and over again. But I am not bringing up the movie to review it or to explore my need to watch it repeatedly.

At the end of the movie, Campbell Scott has quit his job (or been fired, even with the many many times I watched it, I’m not really sure what happened) and he holes up in his apartment. Later, when a neighbor comes by to check on him, it is clear he hasn’t showered or cleaned a dish or moved off the sofa for weeks. He even remarks that it is possible to live in society and never leave the house. A few days or whatever after that, Kyra Sedgwick comes by to get back together with him, and at the end of the movie Matt Dillon says that the two of them are moving in together. Happy ending, la la la.

But the other day, I was flipping through the channels and stopped for a moment on a show called “Six Degrees.” Why did I stop? Did I remember a good review I had read? Was there some engaging dialogue or heart-stopping action taking place? No. What I saw was a grey-haired Campbell Scott getting up from his sofa in a filthy apartment, a place that has all the hallmarks of a holing up hole. There was a little montage showing him clean up the place and shower and shave and then go somewhere for a job interview. The job interview back story referred to his breakdown or whatever. The details of the show escape me, because all I could think was, “What happened to Kyra Sedgwick? I thought you guys were moving in together and here you’ve spent the last fourteen years going grey on your couch.”

I still can’t separate the two images in my mind. Does Campbell Scott have some sort of contract requirement where all star vehicles must include a scene on a couch in a dirty apartment? Where are those fourteen years of Campbell Scott’s and his characters’ lives? When I looked up the show to see what it’s about, Campbell Scott’s character is described as “a divorced father that was believed by many to be dead.” So maybe the hoisting up from the dirty couch – the last place he was seen by a large audience, is a sort of resurrection of sorts for Campbell Scott’s career, which was believed by many to be dead.

Another example:

Tonight when I sat down to channel surf, I flicked right past the Inspiration Channel or whatever it’s called, but then I had to go back and reread the caption under the badly dressed, over-makeupated, screechy preacher lady. It said “Activate your miracle by going to the phone right now!!” Then it changed to “Your donation is God’s authorization to perform miracles in your life.” Then it changed to “Sow your financial seed and reap God’s blessings.”

Did I miss something? I thought the shifty televangelists stealing money had disappeared or at least gone underground during the Jim Bakker/Jimmy Swaggert fiascos. But then I started to worry. What’s my miracle? When did God start asking for authorization and why haven’t I provided it? Why didn’t anyone tell me to sow my financial seed so that I could reap God’s blessings? Is this why my life feels so stressful? I should be watching more TV so I won’t miss out on these investment opportunities.

But today I saw things on TV that make me realize that time has moved on. I got to see holy roller Christian conservative congressmen, once woozy with shock upon hearing that Bill Clinton had cheated on his wife with a grown woman, rather nonchalantly dismissing concerns that that one of their own had propositioned teenage boys. So gay marriage is really really bad, but gay pedophiles are okay, as long as they are Republican? Just because he didn’t get a chance to lay his hands on any of these kids, he’s not a pedophile? Apparently everything can be forgiven and blown off in the name of reelection. I never understood when I heard that countries had dissolved their parliaments, but now I can appreciate how that would be a very appealing idea.

PS. When I did a Google search of Hastert to check what state he was from, the results produced all of these links:

Speaker of the House
Protecting our children from Internet predators and child exploitation ... House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) today made the following statement after ...
speaker.house.gov/ - 22k - Cached - Similar pages

Rep. J. Dennis Hastert, 14th District of Illinois
addressing Internet safety. ST. CHARLES – Congressman J. Dennis Hastert ... and throughout the nation have highlighted the danger of Internet predators. ...
www.house.gov/list/press/il14_hastert/8_29_06_Internetsafety.html - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

Rep. J. Dennis Hastert, 14th District of Illinois
address Internet safety. BATAVIA - Congressman J. Dennis Hastert on Tuesday ... and throughout the nation have highlighted the danger of Internet predators. ...
www.house.gov/apps/list/press/il14_hastert/8_22_06_kidsInternet.html - 6k -

They’ve all been removed from Hastert’s web pages. I wonder why.

Temporarily Interrupted

2006-10-02T23:35:00.000-04:00

Hello! This blog is being renamed, reorganized, and moved to a brand new spot. It is a process that could probably be accomplished by an accomplished person in 4 hours. I'm estimating about 4 weeks. That's not to say I won't be posting anything here in the meantime, it's just fair warning that while I attempt to teach myself web design (Yes, I know there are reasonably priced professionals out there who could do it, but that would not satisfy my obsessive-compulsive need to learn how to do everything myself) I will not have the available brain cells to write much.

Plus all the news that doesn't make me want to cry fills me with rage. And all the news that fills me with rage makes me want to cry.

So really, you're not missing much.

But I promise the crap will reappear in spectacular fashion as soon as possible.

Affordable Childcare - It's All the Rage

2006-09-22T21:49:00.000-04:00

I am not a super mom. I will never be, and never understand, one of those mothers who is endlessly amused and never annoyed by anything that her child does. My kiddies are my favorite people in the world. They are the funniest, the most fun to be around, the lowest maintenance and yet if I don’t get regular time away from them, I start to disintegrate. This summer was different, because at the beach there is always something for them to do, to keep them occupied while I have a little quiet. The school year is something else entirely, because the free time that we have is not free. In the four hours from when they get off the bus to when they go to bed, we’ve got to get through homework and reading and dinner and baths and playing and talking over the day, not to mention whatever appointments, lessons or meetings are scheduled for the week.

This week in addition to the regular mayhem we had 4 dentist appointments, church school and back to school night. Marty went to hourly care during the dentist appointments for obvious reasons, but since I had to pick up the girls as soon as I dropped him off, it didn’t really count as down time.

Today I was within reach of the glorious hour when Marty could be dropped off at hourly care for my 5-hour sanity restoration session. Then the phone rang. I was informed by the minion at the center that since Marty had already been in on three days, he wasn’t allowed to come in today. According to the hourly care in Kentucky, the limit was 5 hours per day and 20 hours per week according to the DA regulations.

Me: But he hasn’t been in 20 hours this week

Minion: We don’t do it by 20 hours, we do it by 3 days.

Me: Is this new?

Minion: No, it’s always been that way. For example, you could bring him in at 8 and leave him until 5 three days a week.

Me: I thought the DA regulation was 5-hours a day and 20 hours a week.

Minion: Oh, no, every installation has its own regulations.

Me (after quickly lecturing myself that the minion doesn’t make the made up rules, she just blindly and unquestioningly enforces them, and she likely would not have ever pondered the fact that if the DA regulations actually did differ across the country they would not really be DA regulations): (…)

Minion: So, I just wanted to let you know before you brought Martin in that you can’t bring Martin in.

Me: Okay then. Bye.

The main source of my rage in this scenario? The hourly care is never full. I wasn’t taking anybody’s spot or keeping anybody out. Many days Marty is the only kid there when I go to pick him up. The sterling administration at the center would rather inconvenience me and enforce the rule than help me out and make the money. That is always their philosophy – the rules are the rules, and even if only one person is being affected by them (and that person in a negative way) the rules will be followed. Because those are the rules. And they made them up. And they are in charge. And they will decide how to organize my life and what arrangements I need to make. And those are the rules.

As my sister pointed out – it’s called “hourly care” so shouldn’t the restriction be according to the hours not the days? Actually, the restrictions are by the hour in the DA regulations, just not in the despotic regime set up at our day care center.

And to be honest, the original DA restrictions filled me with rage too. I can only picture some middle-aged bureaucrat sitting in an office somewhere thinking, “Five hours is enough for a mother who’s not working. Anyone who wants to be away from their kids longer than that is self-indulgent.” The weekly maximum I can understand – if you need more than 20 hours, you should probably get into one of the full-time or part time programs.

I know it may seem high maintenance to complain about a place that actually offers affordable periodic care. However, the administration at this place seems to spend an awful lot of time making sure that we are not getting affordable periodic care easily. They seem to think that we should be willing to jump through hoops and follow inane policies just because their in charge (and don’t even get me started on the “no holiday observance” policy – not even Thanksgiving or Valentine’s day).

I do not understand this place. But until Marty is potty trained and enrolled in preschool elsewhere, I will likely continue to complain about it here. Enjoy!

To the HP, With Greatest Sympathy

2006-09-19T22:36:00.000-04:00

When I was a freshman in high school, the Washington Redskins won the Super Bowl. That year, it was great to be a Redskins fan – they were talented, they were colorful, and they didn’t disappoint. I remember it vividly because it was the first time that I remembered rooting for a team that actually won. My mom was so happy (probably because she had endured more than her share of Redskins strife in her DC life to that point) that she even went out and bought all of us Redskins souvenirs to commemorate the occasion. The city threw them a victory parade in a freezing cold downpour (I was not there because the nuns had issued an ominous warning regarding the punishments that would be meted out to any young lady missing school to attend the parade. Of course, the Jesuits at my brother’s school gave their students the morning off), and for weeks afterward the paper was filled with the witty/drunken remarks of John Riggins and pictures of the Hogs.

Five years later, when I was a sophomore in college, the Redskins won again. I had bet a feeble-minded guy friend a case of beer that the Redskins would win. He called me repeatedly in the first quarter to mock the Redskins performance, but strangely in the second quarter, he disappeared altogether. Oh, now I remember, the five straight touchdowns that the Redskins scored must have killed his enthusiasm for heckling me. I was watching the game alone in my dorm room because none of my friends liked football, and almost no one on campus like the Redskins (of course, once I collected the beer, I was no longer alone since everyone I knew liked beer). I would have bet against Denver no matter who they were playing because I hated John Elway, but that’s another story.

During my first year of graduate school, the Redskins won again. I had two classmates from New Orleans, and they were very excited that the Saints were playing well enough to make the playoffs. When I attempted to show some enthusiasm for the Redskins, I was told that the Redskins were always good, so I couldn’t possibly be as excited as they were. Of course, after the Saints lost in the wild card game, I guess I was more excited than they were, but they did have a point. The 80s and early 90s were a great time to be a Redskins fan.

(Note: My father, brothers, brother-in-law, and possibly my future brother-in-law will not understand the next paragraph)

Because I got to live through those three Super Bowl victories, I don’t get as upset when the Redskins stink (and whew boy, do they stink). I already know that I will not die waiting for the Redskins to win. They did win. I can think back over those years and tell my grandkids about those Super Bowls. Granted, it doesn’t make the current Redskins any easier to take - I’d love for them to have another great stretch where they were the team to beat, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

What got me thinking about the Redskins was this weekend’s performance by the Philadelphia Eagles. The HP, his sister, his dad, and his friends are all Iggles fans, and over the past 10 years, the ineptitude of the Eagles has risen to a level where even I feel sympathy for them (the fans that is, and my mother-in-law who has to be around the fans while they thrash around in agony, cursing and throwing things). The Eagles don’t generally lose because they are less talented, they lose because they are less intellectually gifted. On Sunday, when they blew their 17-point lead for another unexpected and unnecessary loss, I finally understood why the HP is always pulling his hair out, whether the Eagles are winning or losing. He can’t relax even when they are up by 35 points, because they can always find a way to lose.

One opening day when the Eagles were on the verge of winning, the HP and his sister went outside to have a celebratory beer and enjoy the fall foliage. When they came back in and I told them the Eagles had lost, the look of shock on their faces was somewhat comical to me (Redskins fan that I am), but now I understand how long and deep their pain goes. During the fourth (and last) Eagles NFC championship game two years ago, I convinced the HP to take us all to the Embassy Suites so that at least I could have a few drinks, room service, and watch a movie with the kids while he was in the slow excruciating throes of watching the Eagles collapse again.

I have no idea how to help the HP or all of the other Eagles fans that I love (my grandfather for one). All I can tell you is that I now understand how hard it must be to follow that team, how you have to badmouth them continually because you can’t afford to let your guard down again, how you need large amounts of beer to even sit in front of the TV. And really, in Philadelphia, the pain is unrelenting, because the Phillies and the Flyers and the 76ers never do any better. If Smarty Jones had won the Triple Crown, I think the Philly people might have felt a little less cursed.

But he didn’t.

Updates #3

2006-09-14T22:34:00.000-04:00

Going Postal

After the mailman offered me the bike, he avoided me for a full month. When we finally ran into each other again, he told me that someone had stolen it “right out of the yard,” at which point I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I don't know that we could have forged a friendship based on the fact that he delivers my mail and once scared me with the doorbell.

The unlikeliness of a workable friendship was also apparent the day that the kiddies and I came back from the beach for school orientation, the mailman knocked on my door and said “If you had called me, I would have brought your mail today. The notice said you were coming back tomorrow.” I said, “Well, when I filled out the form, I wasn’t sure when I was coming back,” and he said, “If you had called me, I would have brought your mail today.” I wasn’t sure if he was looking for an apology or a promise to call him the next time I had mail held, and I wasn’t sure exactly why he thought I had his phone number, but if he is such a high-maintenance mailman, I can only imagine what sort of friend he is.

In other news, he’s growing back his ponytail, so I’m very curious as to why he cut it off (if we were friends I guess I could ask him). I wonder if it is a slow-moving (1/2-inch per month) defiance of the mailman grooming code.

Ole! Ole, Ole, Ole! Ole! Ole!

The US Team’s World Cup performance: P-U! P-U, P-U, P-U! P-U! P-U!

Even with the crappy refereeing, I still enjoyed the tournament, but Italy should never have won. Also, if a humiliating showing by the US was necessary to finally oust Bruce Arena (who I’m sure is a lovely man), I’ll put this World Cup behind me and cross my fingers for another four years.

Thomas Edison Would Be So Proud

My affection for the continuous spray sunscreen lasted approximately 3 days, which is how long it took the four of us to go through 2 cans. At that rate, we would have been through 40 cans by the end of the summer, and I likely would have had an annex of the Sussex County landfill named after me. I still wish sunscreen could be that easy, but if the can can’t be recycled, I can’t (Does anyone else have the can-can song going through their head?) justify it to my long lost chemist self.

In Search of a Perfect Snow Cone

While visiting auntie Erin in DC this summer, a trip that I started to chronicle prior to being sucked in to the wine bottle at my parents’ house, the kiddies had a chance to sample the Good Humor snow cone of my youth. I can report to everyone, that it has not changed in 30 years. At Aislinn’s insistence I bit into hers, and it was exactly the way I remembered it – completely disappointing. I showed the kids how to pull out the ice chunk and drink the juice at the bottom, but even the juice was tasteless. When I looked at the wrapper, I saw that they only have 30 calories, probably because more sugar would make them melt faster (ding!ding!ding!ding! the expensive college education pays off!). But the kiddies declared them delicious and powered through them, probably because they hadn’t eaten any lunch.

The Brother's Right

2006-09-13T09:33:00.000-04:00

I was being annoyed by Miles O'Brien, so apologies to Shepard Smith. But he's on Fox News so chances are he's annoyed me too.

Ten Things I Need To Get Off My Chest (In a Shamelessly Rip-offy Fashion)

2006-09-12T21:03:00.000-04:00

Dear Power Surge,

I had just convinced Marty that going back to hourly care was going to be a nonstop laugh riot. Why would you come through at exactly 9:00 and set off the fire alarm, just as I’m reaching for the pen to sign him in? On 9/11 no less? Clearly the power has gone to your head.

You’re grounded – Shannon

Dear Weather Channel,

Good God enough already! I think you can rest assured that all of America considers you THE HURRICANE AUTHORITY, and no little start up weather channel is going to try to steal your thunder (hah). No one is going to turn on ESPN or HGTV looking for hurricane updates. Although American schools may be failing, most people can probably figure out that when you want to hear about the weather you should look on the Weather Channel. Oh, and please, please, get Jim Cantore a hobby – no one should wear a look of such intense concern for such a long period of time.

Love, THE ANNOYANCE AUTHORITY

Dear Vacuum Cleaner,

I wish you were a person so I could tell you how much I hate you.

Hatefully, Shannon

Dear Roller Skates,

I know Lauren was getting too big for her britches, saying she had you figured out, but was that really necessary? To twist her ankle in a manner that makes the Joe Thiesman/Lawrence Taylor leg break look like a mere stumble over a bump in the sidewalk?

You are very lucky that she is made of rubber - Shannon

Dear Fly in the Kitchen,

How exactly has evolution allowed you to live, when instead of resting on a half eaten cookie, you insist upon resting on my head? That sort of behavior can only bring about a rampage that will be visited on your head (actually your whole self) and all of your ancestors/descendants.

When you least expect it, expect it - Shannon

PS. Whoever named you a “fly” was obviously a linguistic genius.

Dear Carroll,

Why do you hate me? Don’t sit there and pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. What possible other explanation could there be for leaving this open and running on the toyroom computer? That’s not what sisters do. I have a problem and you’re the one who gave me the crack.

My children are dirty and unfed, and it’s your fault - Shannon

Dear Spider Solitaire,

How can you consider yourself a game when there is no guarantee that you have a solution? How am I supposed to know if it is your fault or my fault when I can’t complete you? Why can’t you be more like your cousin Freecell?

Go away! – Shannon

Dear Hair,

What happened to you? My entire life is based on the fact that I can usually get you in order, even if everything else is a mess. Suddenly you have become some sort of humidity junkie and insist upon sticking out and being frizzy if there is a drop of water anywhere within a three mile radius. Can’t you read the descriptions on the product bottles? I’ve got four things at work trying to keep you down, and still you’re out there nipping at the humidity.

Cut it out… or I’ll cut you - Shannon

Dear Miles O'Brien,

I saw your staged dog rescue after Hurricane Katrina. I can still see you standing there, having your makeup retouched, waiting to go live while that poor dog was trapped. Do you think Walter Cronkite would have put on such a performance? Anyway, once you said: “What’s that? I hear something! I think a dog may be trapped in this debris pile!! Come here! Let’s check! There is a dog! Helloooo pupppeee!!! Good doggie!! Oooooo pupppeee, such a good boy!” etc, etc, you lost all credibility with me (granted, I had never seen you before, so I don’t know if you would have ever had any credibility with me). You are a twit.

The only reason I stopped on your newscast this morning is that I saw you were interviewing the HP’s boss from Afghanistan. First you quote an editorial saying that we do not have enough resources in Afghanistan. Then you asked the general how the poppy crop could have increased this year (in a manner, I might add, that seems to indicate that you think the American troops may have planted the additional poppy crops). Then when the general was attempting to explain the situation to you, you interrupted him to reask the question because you remembered you wanted to say “How could this situation literally BLOOM under your noses?” Sooo clever! That’s not “asking the tough questions,” that’s “being a moronic ass.”

Get Over Yourself - Shannon

Dear Erin,

How does it feel to have your signature blogging format unapologetically stolen by your big sister? Hee hee hee hee!

Update your blog - Shannon

Thinking About John Farrell

2006-09-11T22:19:00.000-04:00

Today a number of bloggers are posting remembrances of the victims of 9/11. I knew one person who died that day – John Farrell. When I looked up the posts about him, both had the familiar picture of John and his cute little niece, and both identified the niece as his daughter. One mentioned his wife although he was not married. I know that the bloggers were using their tribute to him as a jumping off point for their own stories of 9/11, and I don’t have a problem with that. But since they described his life wrong, I feel like he wasn’t really being remembered, so I’m doing it myself, in my patented lame ass fashion.

John Farrell was a year behind me in college, but he was assigned to the same hallway of the dorm that housed all of the guys that my friends and I dated/hated and hung out with. I met him and his friend Jim, and they quickly became part of the crowd. They were memorable and fun to be around just because of their New York-ness - the accent, the animation, the inexplicable devotion to their sports teams. We were friendly acquaintances, and whenever we passed each other in the hall or met up at a party we would smile and say hello, make a little small talk and drift back to our friends. When I think of John, he is always standing in that wide, dingy hallway wearing a pair of sweatpants and he's got a big smile on his face under the remnants of bed head. We never had a long conversation or even a drunken heart-to-heart, but he was never too deeply engrossed in a heated debate about New York sports team to do a reverse nod (chin up instead of down) and say “Hey, Shannon,” with that unmistakable New York accent and smile.

By 2001, I hadn’t seen John in 10 or 11 years, and since we were not in the same reunion class, I might never have seen him again. But I feel sad that he is not out there, that I’ll never hear that one of my NYC friends ran into him at a bar or read about his wedding in the alumni news. After 9/11, I never really said much about John, because I felt like people might think I was stealing some of the sadness that wasn’t mine. We weren’t close friends, but after thinking it over for a while, we did have a connection. We didn’t know each other well, but we wished each other well. It’s good to have people on the friendly fringes, people who don’t know all your crap, people with whom you always have a positive encounter, even if it’s just a nod and a little banter. So this post is just my reverse nod and a “Hey, John,” from someone who does remember exactly the kind of person we lost on 9/11. To read more about John Farrell, try this or this.

Kids Kids Kids Kids Kids Kids Kids

2006-08-15T23:30:00.000-04:00

Sorry, but these days, its all about the kids. I found out about that terror plot in London more than 24 hours after it hit the news because I don't see the news, I see the kids. Over on the other blog I have lots and lots of words about the kids, but over here I just don't know what to say. Not only do I not hear about current events in a timely fashion, but I have no time to evaluate them or formulate my patented lame ass opinion.

I don't know when the essays will resume, but I would say September is probably a good bet. I have topics in mind, just no time to think them out. For goodness sake, I finished THE POWER BROKER a month ago and have still not bored anyone with a review.

See you soon I hope.

Note to Self: Reconnect With Reality

2006-08-04T09:34:00.000-04:00

Last weekend the kiddies were treated to a visit from several of their older cousins, the kind of cousins that are willing to entertain them in the pool for hours on end (incidentally one of my favorite kinds of cousins). By Sunday evening all three were beginning to look like a strange breed of raccoon, with pink rather than black masks around their eyes. So on Monday I decided, in deference to the evidence of sunburn and the pending heat emergency, to take them to the movies. Here’s what happened:

We arrived at the theater with plenty of time to spare, and I marched right up to the ticket window and said, “Four, please.”

Four, please? FOUR, PLEASE?!! I know I don’t get out to the movies much, but I have been there since the invention of the multiplex. Was I reliving a past life from 1952? Somewhere in my mind, was I planning to slide four dimes across the counter to pay for the tickets? Needless to say the rather exasperated grandma-type ticket lady at the window gave me a long stare and then finally said “For which movie?” I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, for Cars,” with a little laugh, attempting to indicate that I was just distracted by the kiddies and not focused on the transaction at hand. The ticket lady did not so much as crack a smirk or roll her eyes, she instead gave a small sigh and pointed at Marty.

“How old is he?”

“He’s two.”

“Then he doesn’t have to pay.”

Until she said that, I’d forgotten the time-honored all-American tradition of ripping off the movie theater (or at least trying to). I bought chidren’s tickets well past my sixteenth birthday (and I think I deserved them since I looked and was treated by most people at the time like I was twelve years old) even as I was sneaking in to R movies. I think she was offended that I wasn’t trying to get Marty in for free, whatever his age. In this area full of eastern European students working for the summer, she had probably looked to me, as a freckle-faced mommy-type American familiar with the English language, to at least perform my duties at the ticket window without needing so much assistance. So I tried again:

“Oh, okay great. Three please then... for Cars.”

“$21.”

The disgruntled ticket lady looked at the $40 dollars in my hand and asked if I had a single.

“Um, no I don’t,” I said, because I have reserved all of my small bills as tip money for the umbrella guy at the beach (I hate getting caught out without tip money for the umbrella guy). This little piece of information clearly shredded the last nerve of the ticket lady who probably had a romance novel under the counter that she was dying to get back to. She probably left home expecting a quiet morning since she works at a MOVIE THEATER at the BEACH and IT WAS NOT RAINING. Not only was I taking excessive amounts of time to buy my tickets, here I was planning to take all of her change

She gave another sigh, and suddenly I remembered that I had some of that shiny stuff in my wallet that can be used to buy things other than time in a parking meter. I counted out a dollar in dimes and nickels, and I hoped that I had redeemed myself a little in her eyes. However, her blank expression did not change at all as she said “Thank You,”and slid the tickets to me through the window. She didn’t even toss a grandmotherly smile toward my three little angels that were standing rather patiently considering the performance their mother was providing.

Into the theater we went to get our popcorn and gummy bears, and since we were so early, I had plenty of time to consider my self-inflicted problems at the ticket window. I decided I needed to get out more, to interact with people more so that a chore such as buying movie tickets does not prove so puzzling to me. In that spirit, today I went out alone to look for some presents for Marty’s birthday. And approximately 10 miles into my trip, I realized that my wallet (my real wallet, not the umbrella guy tip money wallet) was back at the house.

Overcoming Inertia

2006-08-01T22:30:00.000-04:00

My legions of fans that read this blog know that I consider myself a person who was once a fairly intelligent scientist. Therefore, occasionally a law of physics (like entropy) that I once understood will suddenly leap to mind as I muddle through the mindless chores of motherhood. Lately, the law of nature that I have been pondering is the law of inertia, which states that "An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force." As I lie on the couch watching Project Runway reruns, it occurs to me that although I have formulated some of my patented crappy essays in my head, I somehow have not made my way to the computer. Sure I can blame my reluctance on the crazy antique computer parked in my parents' toy room, but really, it's just inertia. I have been unaffected by an unbalanced force. Until today that is.

Today I read an column in the Washington Post about DC libraries, and now I am angry. As I remarked earlier in one of my fascinating squirrel essays, nothing pisses me off more than someone (other than me) talking crap about my brothers and sisters. Now I must move away from the reruns on TV and inform the world that when this (ahem) columnist talks smack about the DC librarians, he has stepped onto dangerous ground. My sister is a DC librarian, and I really don’t appreciate generalized comments like this:

“You could pump mega-millions into the buildings and still have lousy, underused, irrelevant libraries if you don't confront a staff that too often lacks the skills or desire to teach children, help adults and sell learning.”

My sister went to Drexel for two years to get a Master’s degree in library science. Did she take her degree to a high paying law firm or corporation? A private school? Montgomery County? Fairfax County? No, she took it to the DC public library system because she wanted to help kids, kids who need attention from someone who cares about them. She has spent time, energy, not to mention her own money attempting to arrange activities and programs that might inspire a kid or two to come back to the library, read more, and maybe choose to stay out of trouble to remain in the good graces of the children’s room. Many times she has spent hours designing bulletin boards and preparing craft projects even though she knows only a few of her regulars are likely to turn up. Every weekend that I spend with my sister she is exhausted not only from trying to help kids learn to appreciate reading, but from spending a great deal of time and patience enforcing good behavior from kids who haven’t decided if they are in the library to learn or just to cause trouble in an air conditioned building.

And what about this pile of crap:

"The culture of this library is an anti-work culture," says Leonard Minsky, who has spent three years pushing to boost support for the libraries as director of Ralph Nader's D.C. Library Renaissance Project. "There are some good people at the top, but they're engulfed in a sea of apathy and indifference."

Yes, I realize that part of this is a quote from someone else, but Mr. Fisher didn’t choose to object to it, so I will. The “good people at the top” have for six months now delayed, screwed up, and otherwise ignored the raise that my sister earned and was promised this year. As the only remaining children’s librarian at her branch, my sister has skipped lunch many days this summer because the librarians in the “adult” rooms are unwilling to let the children stay in the library without her, and expect her to turn the kids out of the library when she is not there. None of the “good people at the top” has come up with a solution for this, so when she has errands to run on her lunch break, the kiddies must go back out into the heat and find something else to do.

Earlier this summer a group of campers arrived with no snacks or drinks for their afternoon at the library, so my sister ran out and bought gallons of water so that the kids could at least have something to drink. The other librarians there were reluctant to even lend her a book cart to get the water up to the children’s room. What happens when your own collegues won’t help you, when no one is interested in helping you track down the raise you have been promised, when you have poured every ounce of energy you have into helping kids who may never return to the library, when a columnist in the local paper lumps you in with the “anti-work culture” of the library system? Probably you will eventually move on to a job where your energies and efforts are appreciated. And as long as the DC library system is willing to let people like my sister get away, then I would answer the question “… does anyone really expect the crumbling libraries to improve?” with a resounding NO. I know that criticism and bad news is what sells papers, but it wouldn’t hurt anyone to occasionally notice that there are people (like my sister) busting their butts in an attempt to improve their little corner of the library system.

Who Are We Kidding?

2006-07-11T14:14:00.000-04:00

The HP is home on leave so even 500 words seems rather unlikely. I'll see you back on the 26th.

So, Are You Going to Marry Me or What?

2006-07-06T22:42:00.000-04:00

This August the HP and I will celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. This June, like every June, has been filled with wedding specials on TV and in magazines and even the newspapers. The constant barrage of wedding crap has prompted me to think back to my own engagement evening, which is unlikely to inspire any TV producer to knock on our door to share the heartwarming tale with America. So, screw the TV producers, I’m going to tell you myself.

We got engaged eleven years ago on the first Sunday in June in Philadelphia, following the CoreStates Bike Race, which is a professional bike race that loops through the city 10 times (I don’t know what it’s called now that CoreStates bank is gone). The HP spent the entire day drinking with his friends in Philadelphia, while I spent the entire day trapped in a car with my brother and sister returning from my cousin’s wedding in Massachusetts (that was the day that my brother taught me the Dr. Seuss game, and when I recover from it, I will tell you about it). We stopped at my grandfather’s house in New Jersey to take a break, and I called the HP at his friend’s house. He was, shall I say, rather tipsy and after a few moments he thought we had been cut off, but he didn’t hang up the phone. I was reduced to yelling his name into the phone as I listened to him carry it around and tell his friends “I’d better keep this with me. She’ll probably call right back.” I finally gave up and headed home, hoping that by the time I got there he would have hung up the phone again.

When we met up in Philly the HP was, shall I say, rather hammered. We hung around with his friends for a while and then as they dozed off or wandered off one by one, we headed back to my part of town to have dinner. We went to an Irish bar down the street from my apartment and ordered dinner, and then the HP popped the question – I think. He did not have a ring on him, but he seemed serious enough, although he was, shall I say, blindly drunk. I said something terribly meaningful and profound like “Um, yes,” at which point he made his way over to the band, grabbed a microphone, and announced to the crowd “I just ashked Shannon to marry me, and she said yes!” Everyone applauded and that was that.

Later I learned that he had shared his plan to propose with one person, his best friend’s girlfriend that no one liked, including his best friend. Over the year’s I have tried to find out why he chose her to confide in (she, needless to say, is no longer within our circle of friends and unavailable for comment). He can’t tell me, but I’ll always cling to the fact that he told her first, so he must have meant to ask me when he did even though at the time he was, shall I say, slosho.

About a week later he came to my apartment with champagne and roses and a ring and proposed the regular way, but it doesn’t stick in my mind the way the first one does. He had gotten ring advice from a woman with gargantuan hands, so the ring was 3 sizes too big. If it had been the big moment, it might have seemed a little sad that the ring didn’t fit. But since the question had already been asked and answered, we were already moving on together, and at that point the ring didn’t matter. (Of course once I got that baby resized, I wore it constantly, until I started injuring the children with it and had to put it away for a while.) Our story is not likely to inspire many imitators, but the HP’s approach must have been an effective tact. Ten years later, you can’t argue with success.

In Search of a Perfect Snow Cone

2006-07-05T23:04:00.000-04:00

As I have chronicled before, our little kiddies have become snow cone junkies. They spend a lot of their idle summer hours imagining the next snow cone they are going to have. If we will not be having snow cones at the beach, I have to make the announcement repeatedly well before we leave the house and numerous times on the beach for good measure. If we will be having snow cones at the beach, I have to designate the exact moment that we will be hitting the boardwalk or I will be getting constant inquiries (x 3) regarding when snow cone time will arrive. The snow cones are technically called “Hawaiian Shaved Ice” though I have never been to Hawaii and cannot swear that such things are actually served there. I will say that the shaved ice "snow cone" actually seems like a treat made out of snow, unlike the snow cones of my youth long ago.

In my neighborhood, the ice cream man was actually the “Good Humor” man, and he only sold treats made by the Good Humor company. The worst of these, and the one I ordered with more hope more often than any non-paste-eating child should, was the snow cone. The Good Humor snow cone was actually a hard, tri-colored ice cone that was not only impossible to eat, but not very enjoyable at all. Inevitably, I would slurp all of the flavor from the top of the snow cone, leaving a tasteless chunk of ice that could not be removed or chipped away - the only way to get rid of the ice was to eat it, and eat it I did, hating every non-flavored bite. At a certain point I would attempt to pull the whole block of ice out and hold it in one hand while I drank the flavored juice that had pooled in the bottom of the paper cone. Once I had performed that maneuver a couple times, alternating it with bouts of chomping away at the ice on top, I found myself with a freezing hand, a stained shirt, and a slowly dawning realization that there was simply no way to enjoy the ice cone. At that point I usually dumped it into the trash and vowed not to make the same mistake again. However, every summer, after a few popsicles or chocolate eclairs, I would inevitably return to the ice cone to repeat the same disappointing experience.

Why would I order this “treat” time and time again? I have no idea. My current theory is that the sugar concentration of the flavored part of the ice cone was so high that it worked on my brain like crack or heroin – nothing else in the ice cream truck was strong enough, so even though I would swear off the ice cone, cold turkey, I’d always find myself pining away for that rush again.

The only thing that compared to the ice cone was the slush puppy. Down the street from my poppop’s house was a five and ten that sold slush puppies during the summer, and next to the backyard pool it was the thing I envied most about my cousins who lived there. If I had had regular access to a slush puppy machine, I would likely be sitting here with my shiny new teeth fizzing away in a cup of Polident. And the best part of the slush puppy machine was that it introduced me to the most wonderful artificial flavor ever invented: blue raspberry. I am not sure who named it, but it seems that blue raspberry is available from every place that sells flavored ice. It definitely does not taste like raspberries, but I suppose it could taste like blue raspberries - who really knows? Once again, I think there are drug-like properties involved, because from the moment our kids got a taste of it, blue raspberry became one of their favorites too.

Ironically, I do not enjoy the snow cones that our kiddies love, because they are too sweet. The kiddies offer me a taste every now and then and I usually take it, and then I usually lunge for a bottle of water as I feel my teeth begin to dissolve and sense that my pancreas has thrown itself into overdrive. The HP and his sister swear by the Philly staple “water ice” but I’ve never really enjoyed one of those either (although in typical Philly style they both tell me I’ve never had a good one). For now I’ll have to stick with the one fruit flavored frozen treat that I always enjoy – un margarita, muy grande por favor.

Part III: What Is to Be Done? or Male Teachers, This Is Your Lucky Day

2006-06-27T23:05:00.000-04:00

Part III of the Homeward Bound article is entitled “What Is to Be Done?” and includes three rules that women should follow in order to get more access to positions of power.

The first rule is to “Prepare yourself to qualify for good work,” by using choosing college courses based on your future career goals and avoiding “the liberal arts curriculum.” I disagree. I went to a liberal arts college and most of my friends were liberal arts majors. Many who went on to law school, medical school, business school, or graduate school, believed that their writing and critical thinking abilities were greatly enhanced by the liberal arts curriculum. I always thought that college was the place where a person learned how to think, and that the actual classes (unless you wanted to be an accountant) were not as important as the abilities you developed while taking them. Since college I have worked in several different fields related to chemistry, the last one being chemical weapons demilitarization, and although I knew nothing about it going in, I had confidence that I would figure it out and excel over time.

Ms. Hirshman states that after college comes on-the-job training or further education. I agree, in fact, I think a very useful time for furthering education or developing other skills would be while out of the workforce and raising small children. Kiddies nap, daddies like to play with them after work, there is time to put toward personal development. Although Ms. Hirshman belittles volunteer work, a person can develop skills, gain responsibility, and sometimes even make a difference without getting paid. It does not need to be a lifelong full time commitment, but it doesn’t need to be seen as wasted time either. Similarly, part time work may not speed career advancement, but it does keep your foot in the door for the time you are ready to come back. I worked part time and managed to maintain my standing and respect in the workplace, because I took on the jobs I was able to do, and did them without making continual excuses about a late babysitter or a sick child. If I had gone back full time, I might not have performed as well.

My experience segues into the second rule which is “treat work seriously.” I agree that even when I was a working mother, I was a bit annoyed when someone had to regularly dash off because she (or sometimes he) had a child emergency. This was not very empathetic of me and was probably a hangover from my single days, but I felt like they had not planned enough redundant help to avoid the situation. One reason I will not go back to work full time right now is because I don’t want to be an employee that dashes off for every kiddie emergency. I’d at least like to have my husband as a back up, or perhaps a stay-at-home mom friend. For now, I’m willing to be a stay-at-home mom friend for the few women that I know around here that are working.

According to Ms. Hirshman, women are too idealistic which leads them into volunteerism or “indentured servitude in social-service jobs,” not toward money. Again, I agree that women should treat work seriously, but I disagree that money is the only marker of success. Unfortunately for everyone who knows me, I am still reading “The Power Broker” about Robert Moses, the most powerful man in New York for 40 years. He never cared about money, only what he wanted to do with his life, so he took on jobs without pay or for miniscule amounts of money. Rather quickly he had become a subject-matter expert in drafting laws and city planning, he had met and impressed many powerful people, so he was handed more and more power because he had the knowledge to back up his ambitions and was more worried about accomplishing his goals than getting paid. Of course the moral of his story is that with all his power he ruined New York City for generations to come, but it does illustrate that freed from financial worries (as many of the aforementioned New York Times brides are), a person can find ways to gain power.

The third rule is “don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.” By this Ms. Hirshman seems to mean, “do put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.” Women should marry liberal men who are younger and poorer or older and richer. Where do you find younger, poorer, liberal men? Teaching school of course, so things are likely about to get much better for the average 6th grade math teacher. Where do you find older, richer men? They seem to be a rather scarce commodity. The fatal flaw in this marriage advice, is that you can’t help who you fall in love with, all you can do is make sure that you talk about how things will work in the marriage before you commit.

An interesting point that Ms. Hirshman makes in this section and that should be considered by women who want to go back to work is to avoid the “economic temptation to assign the cost of child care to the woman’s income.” I never thought of it that way before, but we did it too (of course, I went back to work and the HP had to stay in the Army, so it was mainly just a calculation not a turning point). The cost of childcare should be considered against the whole family income since some advantages of a woman staying in the workforce are not always quantifiable in dollars.

The final point of this section is one that I have already embraced wholeheartedly even though I’m not back at work: let the house get dirty. When you stay at home, it is harder to overlook the clutter and debris because you are in it all the time. When you are working, you are generally too tired to worry about the clutter and debris when you get home. The HP did a lot more around the house when neither of us was home during the day, and chances are he’ll do the same when I go back to work. I clean up more now because I don’t like to look at it. But we don’t have the sort of relationship where he judges what I do on the housework front, because he knows every complaint about the state of the house can be met with only one response “If you don’t like the way I’m doing it, please feel free to do it yourself.”

What is to be done? I think the main positive outcome of the outrage over Ms. Hirshman’s article would be for everyone to take a stab at developing strategies to support women that are attempting to achieve greater positions of power in society. Some women have no aspirations in this realm, but most women would probably recognize that if we don’t have women in positions of power, no one will be looking out for our interests or the interests of our children (has anyone seen the recent developments regarding the national debt, environmental policy, energy policy, etc. etc. etc.). We take great pride in keeping their children safe and happy at home, but the world currently being prepared for our children is rather horrifying, and the people in power now do not seem concerned with what will happen in 40 years. An article I read about the mommy wars made just this point, and it was one I hadn’t considered. We can’t expect single women to take on the whole responsibility, working mothers are needed too, and we stay at home mothers should try to find ways to help them (until we are ready to join them), rather than criticize their method of parenting.

Yes, It Continues, My Analysis of Part II

2006-06-25T21:16:00.000-04:00

Section II of Linda Hirshman’s “Homeward Bound” article is entitled “The Failure of Choice Feminism” and I am sure is the source of most of the anger from the stay-at-home mother crowd. However, I do not think she is being controversial when she states:

Conservatives contend that the dropouts prove that feminism “failed” because it was too radical, because women didn’t want what feminism had to offer. In fact, if half or more of feminism’s heirs (85 percent of the women in my Times sample), are not working seriously, it’s because feminism wasn’t radical enough: It changed the workplace but it didn’t change men, and, more importantly, it didn’t fundamentally change how women related to men.

Again, I agree. Everywhere I have worked, I have watched older men struggle with the socially correct way to interact with female colleagues. Some hold it in for a while, and then eventually blow, like when one of my bosses asked a potential future employee if she was planning to have kids any time soon (she didn’t get the job for other reasons, but she could have sued that company’s pants off, although apparently it only had a pair of running shorts left because it went out of business shortly after the incident). At my last job, I was often in the position of reviewing the work of four older (50 to 60 year-old) men. While I was merely performing my duty as a reviewer when I marked up their drafts and attached a list of questions, I could tell from the muttering that they sometimes thought I had “overstepped my bounds.” One other worthless coworker once brought me a piece of paper on which he had scrawled something that he wanted added to a report. I read it and said “Okay, type it up and send it to me,” which left him absolutely flabbergasted. Obviously he felt that since I was younger and female, I should type it up for him.

Right before our son was born, the HP and I met with a financial planner who was showing us all sorts of charts and figures of what we needed to save and how much insurance we needed, etc., etc. I finally stopped him and said “These projections don’t make any allowance for my income.” He said to me “Wouldn’t it be nice if you never had to work again?” I said to him “No, I can’t wait to go back to work when the kids are bigger.” He looked at me for a minute and went back to his spiel. I didn’t insist that he recalculate everything, mainly because I didn’t want to have to see him again. The worst part of the incident was that he was not an old man, he was my age, and he thought I should aspire to a life of leisure. Something is not right there.

I’m sure that the anger about this article started brewing at the end of this section, where Ms. Hirshman states “Feminists could not say ‘Housekeeping and child-rearing in the nuclear family is not interesting and not socially validated. Justice requires that it not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender and at the sacrifice of their access to money, power, and honor.’”

Where do I go with this one? I wholeheartedly agree that housekeeping is indeed not interesting or socially validated and it should not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender, etc. A lot of the parts of child-rearing are interesting but a lot of them are drudgery. Childrearing is also not really socially validated, because if it was, more men would want to do it (although I don’t think social validation is the reason that women want to do their own child-rearing; it is certainly not the reason I do it). I also agree that it should not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender, but I don’t think women who want to do these things should be belittled. Nevertheless, one person’s opinion on what those tasks are worth is just that, one person’s opinion. I won’t go red in the face trying to change this woman’s mind.

I’m sure that the anger about this article reached its white hot intensity with the following statement, “[these women] all think they are ‘choosing’ their gendered lives. They don’t know that feminism, in collusion with traditional society, just passed the gendered family on to them to choose.” For a thesis, that sentence seems a little glib. Anyone unfortunate enough to have known me when Aislinn was 9 weeks old (and I had decided I couldn’t put her into full-time day care) was subjected to an absolutely endless explanation of why I was going back to work part time. I spent days and nights trying to find a way to justify myself to all the working women I knew, to my parents who had paid for my education, and to myself, because I had so much ambition that it was hard to put it aside. I used up hours of the lives of everyone I knew, trying to explain what I was doing and why I thought I was doing the right thing. No one reacted with anything other than support or suggestions about how I could get the most out of my professional life while still spending time with the baby. To say that my current role was “passed on” to me and I that cheerily took it on like a Stepford wife without any sort of introspection is insulting to me, untrue, and a crock.

Part I - My Take on Part I

2006-06-23T12:37:00.000-04:00

The article in American Prospect is entitled “Homeward Bound” which unfortunately evokes that quiet Simon and Garfunkel song, which is a bit at odds with the content of the article (and lyrics like “I wish I was, homeward bound” seem to be the opposite of what we’re supposed to feel). The article is divided into four parts, and Part I is The Truth About Elite Women. Apparently Ms. Hirshman was researching a book on marriage after feminism and was inspired by an episode of Sex and the City to interview the brides listed in the New York Times wedding announcements, announcements full of “brilliantly educated and accomplished brides.” Ms. Hirshman was surprised to find that after ten years, of the thirty brides with babies, only 10 were working full-time, 5 were working part-time, and the rest were not working at all. I was surprised by this because unlike me, most of the women I know went back to work after having children. None of them went to Ivy League schools, and none of them had their wedding announcements printed in the New York Times, but each was well-respected in a professional career.

Ms. Hirshman’s explanation for this situation states that “while the public world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home,” and that “the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by decades of workplace feminism.” I agree. Does that mean I think child-rearing and homemaking is unimportant or that people who do them (like me) are losers? No, I do think these jobs are important and I do think there is honor in doing them, but I also think that although the modern husband changes diapers and cooks dinner, he has never been challenged to change what he thinks about the division of labor once the kiddies arrive.

I think that the average man (not every man) expects that even if his wife is working, when the kiddies are sick or the plumbing is broken, the wife will be the one to stay home. This is not because the average man is a jackass, but because that’s what happened when the average man was little, his mom took care of him and his mom took care of the house. In addition, the average man has probably experienced a feverish whiny toddler pushing him away and moaning for mama. Given those experiences and the fact that the average man wants his kiddies to be happy, it probably seems logical to leave the kiddies with the parent they are asking for. Ideally, the parent who stays home should be the one with the more flexible workplace, but usually it’s the mom. (Let me state here that the phrase “average man” does not include the HP. Whether or not the HP can stay home or come home early is usually dependent upon how well his boss gets along with his own wife. If there is trouble, the colonel keeps him in the office till all hours. If things are happy, the colonel is flexible about when he comes and goes. Also, the HP does not have any sick leave).

I don’t think the root of the controversy over the “Homeward Bound” article came from this section describing the lackadaisical brides from the New York Times. Some people may consider these women the best and the brightest, but how much can you really learn about a person from their wedding announcement? Are wedding announcements normally considered to be entirely truthful and without embellisment? It is unlikely that women who quit work before they had children or who “never want to work again” were ever seriously considering a groundbreaking career. Chances are many of these women are from a privileged level of society where power and money are already held by the family or the husband’s family, so any additional contribution by any of the younger generation is unnecessary. This is a hard obstacle to overcome. A harsh article on feminism is not going to shock them back into the office. You cannot shame a woman into ambition; you can only hope to find ways to aid the women who have it.

Sorry to Disappoint, But This Post Does Not Involve Dead Squirrels

2006-06-22T22:38:00.000-04:00

I missed the Part I of the Linda Hirshman (December 2005) controversy completely, probably because the HP had just deployed and I was avoiding the news, which rarely mentions anything positive about Afghanistan. The first inkling I had of Part II of the Linda Hirshman controversy was a little bit that I saw of a morning show where she was recently promoting her new book, based on the article that inspired Part I of the controversy. I quickly flipped away, figuring she was someone like Joel Stein who said he didn’t support the troops in order to bring attention to himself or someone like Ann Coulter who said… or shall I say, will say anything to bring attention to herself. However, this past weekend, I was reading The Washington Post at my parent’s house, and I came across the article entitled “Everyone Hates Linda.” I didn’t notice until I began reading, that it was written by Ms. Hirshman, as a sort of answer to the fallout from part I of the controversy.

As a stay-at-home mom, I can tell you that given all the controversy, I was surprised to find that not much of what she had to say in the article was especially offensive to me. It seemed a little catty and a little snide, but she was obviously wounded or at least wearied by the reaction to her first article. However, what I read made me curious enough to print out the original article to see if I could figure out why everyone was so angry. When I read things that I do not agree with, I generally mutter to myself (in an entirely mentally healthy way) “What a crock,” and continue on. Taking this approach, I was able to find some points in the original article that I agree with, and some things in the article that I take strong issue with, but nothing that would make me screech.

I will provide my opinion of the original article over the next few days for what it’s worth, but this analysis will be about me (me me me me me) and based upon my experience and what I think. I am not claiming that everything here applies to every one who reads it. But first a little bit more about me. I am not what Ms. Hirshman identifies as the “elite” because although I have a college degree and a graduate degree, they are not in law or business but in science, so I never did stand much of a chance at becoming a CEO or partner or university president. I suppose technically, I have given up my career to support my husband’s, but the end of his career is a definite point on the calendar. Also, while he is always willing to be supportive of me, in the end the decisions about how much he travels (and let me tell you, this past business trip has been an enormous pain in the behind), what hours he works and where or when we move is out of his hands. It is hard to negotiate alternative working conditions with the Army.

I went back to work part time after our first daughter was born, because I liked working, not because we needed the money or because I felt I had something to prove. When the Army moved us to Kentucky, I was pregnant with our second daughter and we were under the impression that we would only be there for two years. Seeking out new employment under those circumstances seemed rather silly, so I took some time off to spend with the kiddies. We ended up staying in Kentucky for four years, and from time to time I wished I could go back to work, but the job opportunities in that part of Kentucky were pretty much limited to exotic dancing or check cashing, so I never did rejoin the ranks of the employed. Now with the HP deployed, I have sole responsibility for the kiddies, a situation with the potential to make me a crappy employee, one that would probably add to the stereotype of unreliable mommy workers. In addition, I am not the type who can do a half-assed job. I’d rather delay my return to work until I have the support in place to be a focused successful employee.

I have been out of the workforce for five years, but my return to work is on the horizon - the buddy boy is two years from kindergarten and the HP is less than four years from military retirement. Theoretically, in four years we will have settled into our own house where we want to live, and then we can decide how we can both work and take care of the kiddies. Since the HP has expressed his desire to drive a potato chip truck, I think his hours will be rather flexible and everything will work out. In reality, he may become a teacher (in which case he will fit the crazy marriage material rules that are included in the American Prospect article, but more about that later) which would greatly increase my options in building a career, because his hours would match the kids’ hours (and because he's willing to take care of the kids).

I think that what Ms. Hirshman failed to realize when she wrote her article was not that it would be controversial, but that reasoned discussion, listening, and thoughtful consideration of other people’s opinions are no longer considered virtues in this society. If someone is going to take a sound bite from you, it is going to be out of context and the most inflammatory thing he/she can find. In a few of the comments and quotes I have seen from her, she seems to have taken a stab at following the new American rule of discourse: “I’m louder and ruder than you so I’m right.” She isn’t very good at it, so I will surmise that maybe she isn’t usually like that, maybe she’s just a regular human who is smarting from personal attacks that are unrelated to her article and/or based upon an incomplete review of it. I could be wrong, she could be a stone-cold bitch who will someday stumble across this post and scream "I don't need any sympathy or understanding from you, you pathetic stay-at-home loser!!" But for now I will grant her the benefit of the doubt and attempt to discuss her points without attacking her personally. I can’t promise that this enterprise will be interesting to anyone, but somehow I think it may be therapeutic for me.

(Okay, one squirrel update: two squirrels were running around the yard today knocking the flowers from one of my day lilies and digging in my petunia pots which have been planted for so long, that only a mentally deficient squirrel (and really aren’t they all) would bother thinking something was buried in there. In a barely contained seething rage I grabbed the Tabasco and sprinkled it all over the pots and the day lilies. Tomorrow all of the plants may be dead, but so far the squirrel activity in the yard has disappeared.)

Two Dead Squirrels Is Not Enough

2006-06-21T22:28:00.000-04:00

On Friday morning I had a little less than 3 hours to get ready for our trip to the beach before it was time to pick up the kiddies. In addition to finishing the laundry, cleaning up, vacuuming and packing, I decided that since the lawn was rather shaggy and the next opportunity to mow it (now at 5 days and counting) was unclear, I’d better at least mow the front so that the average passerby wouldn’t note our name on the door and equate it with “white trash.” I have previously described (at ridiculous length) my tolerance/hate relationship with the mower. However, when I approached it on Friday morning, I noticed that something was amiss. The disgusting, revolting, annoying, creepy, bizarro, scraggily squirrels had chewed through the gas cap on the mower. Just as I feel perfectly justified making fun of my siblings but am instantly filled with rage when anyone else does it, I feel perfectly justified in hating the mower, until some filthy rodent comes near it.

I decided I’d better check around the car port (that’s right, I said car port) to determine if anything else had been chewed. And that is when I found the cement floor littered with the tiny black chewed up remnants of what had once been the seat to my bicycle. The immediate result of this discovery was blinding rage, quickly followed by the realization that I was now going to have to carve enough time from my three free hours to find a place in the shed for all of the bicycles and toys that I didn’t want the squirrels to eat.

To me the shed has always been the no-man’s-land of our marriage, because the shed is where we keep things that are either 1) big and heavy or 2) related to landscaping chores, neither of which is my area of responsibility. We lived for two years in a house with a shed that I visited exactly twice (in the same day when the HP was away), once to get the snow shovel and once to put it back. While I was willing to take on the HP’s closet while he was gone, I really hoped the shed would not need my attention because it is a bit of a disaster area.

Anyway, you can imagine my good humor as I attempted to load three bikes, a stroller, and all of the toys that were scattered around into the already full and disorganized shed. Once I’d finally locked up everything that a stupid squirrel would want to chew on, I went out to mow, where I realized that one end of the yard was littered with small leafy branches. The branches obviously were ripped from the tree and dropped to the ground while the same weirdo squirrels that ate my bike seat were attempting to build themselves a little love nest. As you can imagine, I could really see the humor in the situation when, pressed for time as I was, the rodents who delayed my start then made it impossible for me to accomplish anything without first cleaning up the yard.

When I finally managed to bag up all of the branches and sticks, I had about 45 minutes left to mow the lawn, shower, load the car, and pick up the kids. And right about then was when my rage turned homicidal (I was even willing to put up with additional visits from the redneck squirrel remover if it meant a reduction in the pest population). Unfortunately, I am rather nonviolent. Even though I would love to run down some of the young idiotic squirrels that are always dashing out in front of my car, I’m just not that kind of girl. Instead, bad ass that I am, I left the mower and the gas can out in the car port, in hopes that the moronic pest would come back to chew some more and keel over in the process. None did.

I Can Pick My Friends, and I Can Pick My Nose...Must I Pick My Trash?

2006-06-20T22:22:00.000-04:00

I have a roof over my head, money in the bank, and a car to drive around, so why do I find myself repeatedly picking through the trash? At a certain point, it seems like a grown person should only be looking in the trash if expensive jewelry or orthodontia is missing and cannot be located in any logical or illogical place within the house or car or yard. And yet, on Friday morning, before I had even gotten dressed, I found three different reasons to pick through the trash.

For her birthday Aislinn received a charm bracelet set that came with two bracelets and about 40 little charms that you can change out depending on your mood or outfit (or for no apparent reason if you are a seven-year-old). In a move of great diplomacy, Aislinn offered up the second bracelet to Lauren who quickly picked out five charms that she wanted me to attach. Although we were seated next to each other, Lauren did not want to turn the hardware over to me until she had deposited her used tissue into the trash. I will never discourage a child who 1) is using a tissue rather than me to wipe her nose and 2) is willing to make the trek all the way to the trashcan to throw it away. Approximately 10 seconds after she disappeared into the kitchen, Lauren let up a wail and informed all of us that she had dropped one of the charms in the trash. Unfortunately, these were not enormous toddler-safe charms, but dainty little charms, the size of a small dangling earring.

Since there were 30 other charms in the big charm bracelet set, I didn’t think I needed to be particularly thorough in my search of the trash, but Aislinn and Lauren were both convinced that the one that was missing was most likely their favorite one of all. So I pulled the trash bag out of the can and began looking through it for the teeny little charm. Of course the bag was full, and about halfway down were the contents of the vacuum cleaner. I informed them that it couldn’t be found, and as they set upon their individually designed expressions of woe, I realized that the bag would not fit back into the can, so I spun it around to tie it up, and I actually caught sight of the charm and managed to retrieve it, resulting in a much deserved hero’s reception for me from the weeping girls in the living room. (Approximately 10 seconds after that, Lauren dropped another charm behind the couch, but that one can live there until we move out as far as I’m concerned.)

A few minutes later as I was taking the aforementioned trash bag and some cardboard recycling outside, I noticed that inside the pizza box from Wednesday night was our pizza cutter. It is not an expensive or particularly impressive pizza cutter, but I have been using it quite a bit lately since it is plastic and will not scratch Teflon and hasten our deaths. I don’t normally throw things out, so I was puzzled to find it there, but then I realized, maybe I do normally throw things out, and that is why I can never find anything. I would have spent the rest of our time in this house wondering what happened to that pizza cutter, but I never would have concluded that it had ended up in the trash.

Since I was well into trash duty for the morning (and since we were going away for the weekend) right before I left to take Aislinn to the bus stop, I made a sweep through the house and emptied all of the little trash cans. As I was dumping out one from the kid’s bathroom, I watched a brand new, bright white sock head toward the bottom of the trash bag. Of course I pulled that out too, and now I must ask myself, what exactly is going on here?

Anyone who reads this blog will know the answer. Trash work is for boys. The girls and I just don’t have the necessary genes for managing the household refuse. And Marty? Approximately 30 seconds after we arrived home this evening, Marty had loaded my sneakers, a recently delivered box, and a toy from the busy box into the kitchen trashcan and was pushing it around the room. Clearly he wants to manage the trash, but he’s only two, so it is going to take him a while to catch on. So apparently while the HP is deployed, I must consider taking on a new career as trash picker/dumpster diver/recycling rooter. Ew.

Dig It

2006-06-15T21:41:00.000-04:00

One of the advantages of my current house is that it is directly in front of the neighborhood swings and playground. Our living room has three floor to ceiling windows and a glass door, so that if I wanted to, I could send the kids outside and sit in a recliner with a frosty cold beverage and still be able to see what they were doing 75% of the time (and isn’t that really enough?). Actually, since I am slightly paranoid, they are never outside for more than 45 seconds or so without me, but when we are all inside we can sit and stare out the windows and watch other people/critters play/expire at the playground/on our back deck (concrete slab).

I have previously described the nasty sand that is under the swings behind the house, and although as I write this I feel like I need a shower from just thinking about it, I have let the kiddies play back there when they are so inclined. The last one to venture back there was Marty, who left the playground and went back to our “deck” where he picked up several pails and shovels and headed back to the sand. I reacted to this development with absolute joy, that he had actually thought of a way to entertain himself and then executed it without even glancing in my direction. Normally the kiddies all want a lengthy discussion with a timeline, milestones, visual aids, etc., etc. before they are willing to leave my side (yes, I am that great of a mother that the kiddies can’t bear to be without me).

Of course, since Marty is two, when he was distracted by something shiny and moved on to another activity, he left all of the pails and shovels in the sand, and I have not gone back to retrieve them. They are the type of sand toys that Target sells for a dollar so that all the mothers (ahem, like me) who are too lazy to go pick up the sand toys can just go buy more when they disappear. And so this week, occasionally, I have looked out and seen other kiddies playing with the lame sand toys that we left out in the sand. Some of them use the shovels to put sand in the pails, some of them use the shovels to fling sand on the other kids on the swings, but the repeated spectacle of the kiddies and the shovels and pails reminded me of something that I read in The Power Broker (the book I am reading and will likely be reading for the rest of my life) which is about the development/destruction of NYC by Robert Moses.

According to the book, in 1932 in NYC, “which contained approximately 1,700,000 children under twelve years of age, there were only 119 [playgrounds], or one for every 14,000 children. ‘Children’s gardens’ in playgrounds were the only places in which slum children could engage in that most precious of childhood activities: digging…Playground supervisors made children stand on line with their pails and shovels until a spot in the gardens was open, and the lines were so long that most of the girls and boys could see at a glance that they were unlikely to get a turn.”

Obviously, that description is a little startling, and not just because there were so few playgrounds and sandboxes. Playground supervisors? That used to be a job? If the playground supervisor was not there, the playground was not opened. Can you imagine? In theory, it would be nice to think that some energetic college student could spend a summer entertaining children at a playground, lifting them on to swings and putting bandaids on their scrapes. Pushing the stinking swings (maybe I’ll sponsor one of those positions this summer) and giving the parents a chance to chat while the playground supervisor retrieved the shriekers from the top of the monkey bars (of course, many of you are probably thinking of the other end of the spectrum – playground supervisor = child molester, but I’m referring to the theoretical world here). Anyhoo…

I can appreciate that children need to dig, and actually I enjoy a good construction project on the beach with the kids (because beach sand is much cleaner than playground sand. Shut up. Yes it is.). My dad built us a sandbox when we were young, and even though it was uncovered and often filled with debris and dessicated worms, it was still fun. So, I figure I’ll leave the buckets and shovels out there for any kiddie who wanders by and wants to dig. I thought for a while about doing a little public works project out there myself, maybe putting out a big bucket with all kinds of shovels and sand toys in it, but that would probably disappear. Things are probably fine the way they are. No one will bother with faded $1 sand toys, except for the kiddies who really want to dig.

Thomas Edison Would Be So Proud

2006-06-13T23:04:00.000-04:00

My friends, I have discovered that 1500 words is a lot easier for me than 500, probably because I feel the need to beat every subject into submission. These 500 word posts are taking me almost as long as the long ones did, and are turning out rather crappy. However, for now I will continue on with the short ones and hope they improve. In the interest of providing my few readers with something that is not cranky or reminiscent of a rant, I have decided once again to try to write a post for the positive side. Here is Part One of what will be a periodic series describing some recent inventions (or inventions that I’ve recently discovered) that I believe have really improved life on the planet for all of mankind:

Press ‘n’ Seal Plastic Wrap. I don’t know when plastic wrap was invented, but it seems to me that the plastic wrap industry was resting on its laurels for many a decade. It never occurred to anyone to make plastic wrap that would not only stick to the container that you were trying to cover but also keep the air away from the thing you were trying to preserve? This stuff tears like a dream and once kept half a head of cauliflower in my refrigerator from turning brown for over a week. The great mind behind this product needs to be feted at the Kennedy Center and then sent home with a piece of cake (tightly sealed to its plate by Press ‘n’ Seal Plastic Wrap).

Continuous Spray Sunscreen. I suppose it is possible that the propellants in this type of sunscreen are actually contributing to the hole in the ozone layer that we are attempting to protect ourselves from. Nevertheless, I hate putting on sunscreen, and now that I have 3 kids and a husband, I hate it 4 times more than I used to, because now I am responsible for warding off skin cancer for the whole family, not just me. I have been waiting and waiting for somebody to invent an easier way to put on sunscreen, and finally they have. The only complaint I have about this stuff is that we used up one can in less than a week and the can is unrecyclable. However, for arms and necks and faces on the average day that we are going to the playground or swimming pool, I think I’m going to have to turn my back on mother earth and just use it. It’s made my life that much better.

90-Second Rice. I know this also has nonrecyclable packaging and flies in the face of my resolutions to try to keep the earth cleaner, but rice in 90 seconds? What could be better than that? It makes the five minutes you need to make couscous seem like an eternity. Now some days I can get dinner on the table for the kids in 3 minutes (cut up a ham steak, rinse off some frozen peas, and microwave the rice). With all the freaking cooking I have to do these days, I am sticking with the 90-second rice at least until the HP comes home. Not to mention the fact that the kiddies love it, and sometimes specifically ask for it, as in “Are we having 90 second rice?” or “Can I have some more 90 second rice?” Uncle Ben, you had me at “90 seconds.”

So there you have it, three things that may hasten the destruction of the planet, but that make me ever so happy. Maybe I can find ways to offset the additional trash I am producing by using this stuff. Perhaps we could start a trash trading market like the emissions trading market they have now, and I could buy some trash points from one of those families in Vermont that only puts out one can of trash per year. To me, no price could be too high.

Take That Mother F$#@$^! I'm Mentally Disabled!

2006-06-12T22:28:00.000-04:00

When I hear codgers/radio personalities/people on Fox News talking about how everyone has an excuse for the bad things they’ve done (“Momma didn’t love me,” “Daddy was a drunk,” “Grandma gave me paper towels for a birthday present”), I usually ignore them. In defiance of what the people at Fox News tell me, I try to judge things I hear on a case by case basis, instead of making a proclamation and demanding that everyone agree that it explains everything that has ever happened in the past, present, and future. And then, the other night, I caught the very end of the NBC Nightly News where Brian Williams was describing, and mocking in his own intolerable smug way, the discovery of Intermittent Explosive Disorder. I have considered this disorder (drawing upon my one semester of Psychology from college) and decided that it is, in fact, a load of horse poop, in every situation that has ever happened in the past, present, or future.

According to the Washington Post, “By definition, intermittent explosive disorder involves multiple outbursts that are way out of proportion to the situation.” If this is a psychological disorder, then I want to sue somebody, because I have been surrounded by people like this my whole life. In fact, I was one of them, so I want to sue somebody for the damages that I caused to myself. In my house, we have a definite candidate for this disorder (although he has temporarily relocated to the Middle East). I had no idea that when I christened his alter-ego “Spaz Boy” I was actually mocking a psychological condition that he had no control over. That time he took the bag full of spilled Chinese food and howled at the heavens, he wasn’t just being a loon, he was uncontrollably demonstrating his disability. That time he freaked out because I forgot to have the dealer stamp our maintenance book after the car was serviced, he couldn’t help himself - he is mentally challenged. That time (or should I say those times) he screamed and grabbed his head as the Philadelphia Eagles gave away a game they had almost won, he wasn't just reacting irrationally, he was emotionally disturbed.

However, the strange thing is, Spaz Boy doesn’t come around much anymore. I suppose it is possible that someday the HP’s head will explode with all of the rage he had been suppressing for the past ten years. However, I suppose it is also possible that living with me has changed him a little bit, without any need for medication or intense psychotherapy. If he was able to change on his own (and years ago I was able to change on my own) maybe the other sufferers can too. I believe in medical terms this is called “chilling out.” Throwing temper fits is not a sign of mental illness; it is a sign of self-indulgence. I’m sure the court cases using IED for a defense have already sprouted and begun working their way through the system. Psychologists might as well start printing money with all the expert witness testimony they will be providing to every jerk who takes a swing at someone else in a bar. But the worst outcome of this new disorder is that the people at Fox News will be right. If this is allowed to be a disorder, then there really will be an excuse that everybody can use to explain the bad things they've done.

Aislinn Turns Seven

2006-06-09T11:26:00.000-04:00

Since the time Aislinn’s teeth finally came in (at 15 months old), I haven’t really spent much time wondering about her them. I was hoping for her sake that some would fall out, so she could have a big gap in her smile like all the other kids in her class. So I have waited with her for some loosening of her teeth, figuring (wrongly) that her teeth were not falling out because it took them so long to come in. This week Aislinn had two teeth pulled to make room for a permanent tooth that has already surfaced. The dentist put Aislinn’s pulled teeth in a little plastic box shaped like a tooth. I took them out and couldn’t believe what I found. I know it should not have been shocking to me, but they were so small and looked just like the teeth she got when she was a baby (because they are the teeth she got when she was a baby, dummy). I know that teeth don’t grow, but it seems ludicrous that a for almost six years she has been eating using only these teeny teeth that fit inside her mouth when she was only a baby.

Everyday I watch my kids grow and achieve, and every day I am glad that they have become a little more self sufficient and a little more confident in confronting the world without me. I have never really felt that they have “grown up so quickly” because time doesn’t really pass quickly for me. Today we were looking at pictures from two years ago, and all of the kiddies seemed tiny. Could that only be two years ago? It seems like a decade. From time to time I consciously tell myself “Stop a minute and remember this. This is something that you shouldn’t forget,” but I do have a strong ability to enjoy the present. I don’t overlook it because I am too busy planning for the future or miss it because I am wistfully remembering the past. I suppose it helps that I am home with the kiddies all the time, so I have many many many hours of time with them to remember. If I only saw them for a few hours each day, time probably would seem to speed up, and maybe when they are all in school full time, I will start to feel like they are growing up quickly.

When I look back through Aislinn’s baby pictures, I can see how her curly hair has straightened out, her chubby face has thinned out, and her round little arms and legs have become the impossibly long skinny limbs she has now. I have watched her from the time she learned her ABCs to the day she started reading on her own. I have seen her as she learned to crawl, then walk, run, jump, hop, and climb. And still those tiny little teeth startled me. They are a tangible part of her babyhood, like the stroller or the high chair, that she doesn’t need any more.

I suppose all first time parents are unprepared for what’s coming along in nine months, and I was no exception. I had no idea how I would relate to this little stranger, how I would figure out what he/she was like. The day Aislinn was born, as the nurse wrapped her up in a blanket and put her in my arms, I looked down at her sweet little face and my heart…blah, blah, blah, I’m not really that kind of girl. What happened was she looked me straight in the face and screamed, and the HP and I laughed, because there she was. She was not mysterious, she was minutes old and telling us exactly what she felt. That was a huge relief to me, and for the past seven years, she has continued to make us laugh and make us proud and make us wonder how any other kid (other than her siblings) could possibly be as wonderful as she is. So Happy Birthday Ais Crais! You were a great baby, a stupendous toddler, a charming preschooler, a fantastic kindergartener, an award-winning first-grader, and I’m sure you’ll be the best second grader on record.

Hey Immigrants! Come Here and Share Our Values!

2006-06-07T22:31:00.000-04:00

Want to hear something really, really funny? Are you sitting down? I’m sorry, I keep chuckling to myself which makes it hard to type. Are you sure you’re ready? Guess what? I have avoided writing about politics in this blog because I don’t have enough time to get my facts straight! I know! Can you believe it! What in the world was I thinking? Politics and facts don’t go together!!! So even though I haven't had time to provide citations for all of the examples I put here (unlike yesterday's fascinating and informative porcupine post), I still feel compelled to provide this public service to prospective Americans:

Dear Immigrants (Illegal and Otherwise),

Today our president made a speech indicating that if you would like to join our country, first you must learn our values. Before I go on any further, I would say to all of you who came here to have your gay marriage recognized, please return to your country of origin. Gay marriage is not one of our values. Similarly, if you have left your home and family to come here and burn flags, once again I’m going to have to ask you to leave. Flag burning is not one of our values.

What’s that? You came here in search of a better life for you and your children? To work any job you can to make money to send home to your families? That is rather quaint, but I’m sorry, you are too late. Those are no longer American values either. Since I am not philosophically opposed to immigration (and as such am bordering on the un-American myself), I have decided to provide you with a primer on what constitute American values these days, so that you can adopt them and maybe win a chance to spend money and stand in line for a chance to get a chance to take a test and possibly become an American citizen. Ready?

1) Here in America, we value our rich people, so please bring as much money as you can. Since many of you (who do not have a lot of money) have indicated your willingness to work at unpleasant jobs for unpleasantly low pay in order to increase the wealth of your employers, I think we can consider you well on your way to adopting this value. If you do somehow end up with a lot of money, we will cut your taxes so that you can have more money. If any pesky environmental laws are keeping you from making even more money, you can help us rewrite them. After all, we’re not going to live forever, and who really cares what happens when we’re gone. I mean, we care that the wealthiest people can give their money untaxed to their heirs, but besides that, who really gives a crap what goes on when we’re down for our dirt nap?

2) Here in America, we value our institutions, exactly the way they are. If you would like to become an American, then you must view all evidence of ineptitude and incompetence by our government agencies as one big misunderstanding. Do not call for investigations or changes or expect anyone to accept responsibility. Instead agree to continue funding these agencies even when they refuse to change as suggested by independent commissions. For instance, if you live in a town that was destroyed by a crappy Corps of Engineers project, the American way is to throw more money at them to do another project while providing no additional oversight. If you decide live in Washington, DC or New York City, you can peruse reams of data about why you are a likely terrorist target, but we like to spread our homeland security money around the country, and the facts are not going to change the way we do things.

3) Here in America, we value our Christians. I know most of you from coming up from the south are probably Catholic, and while that is okay, we’d really prefer some sort of protestant affiliation, preferably one where the women submit to the men and let the men make all of the decisions. If you are from one of those newfangled religions that doesn’t revolve around the ten commandments, I’m sorry, but you’re not going to find many friends here. While you may be concerned about the poor, or sick, or disenfranchised, I’m afraid they are going to have to wait until we have rid the earth of gay marriage.

4) Here in America, we value big mouths (as long as they are speaking English). You may have expertise in one aspect of business or science and you may be well educated. However, that doesn’t mean we will listen to you. What you need to succeed here is an extremely loud voice and your own TV show. If you do not have your own TV or radio show, your opinion really doesn’t need to be expressed or acknowledged. So please either be an opinionated intolerant blowhard or keep your mouth shut.

5) Here in America, we value our freedom of speech, as long as you are saying things that we want to hear. Please don’t think that freedom of speech means you are free to say anything you would like. You cannot shout “Fire!” in a movie theater and you cannot criticize the current administration. If you choose to object to anything that is going on in Washington, that is your right, but it is also a clear indication that you are not ready for citizenship or even guest worker status. We have recently upped the indecency fines for television, because everyone knows that getting flashed during a Super Bowl halftime show is much worse than say, the Vice President calling a U.S. Senator a f?#$%?@ a&%*@#$.

6) Here in America, we value our soldiers, kind of. We have decided that treating detainees humanely and observing the Geneva Convention isn’t one of our values anymore, and this may adversely affect how our soldiers are treated. However, as they are having their fingernails pulled out, they can rest assured that all of us will have a yellow ribbon magnet on the back of our cars saying we support them. As long as they are not killed in action, we will support their families on the homefront, but if they are killed, I’m afraid we’re going to need that house back pronto. And the kiddies, I’m sure someone out there will give them some counseling, but that is really outside of our area of responsibility. Oh, that little mixup where the identities and personal information of millions of soldiers was lost/stolen? Please refer to value #2.

Here are a few other things we value, so please do not complain about them: domestic spying; secret CIA prisons or airplanes; the idea that when the National Guard gets home from the Iraqi desert they should deploy to our desert; the destruction of our worldwide reputation as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

So good luck to you all. I hope these little pointers will help you in your quest to adopt American values which are so different from the values of your home countries. Sorry folks, no more eating your young, no more 60-day cocaine-fueled benders, no more neighborhood wife-swapping night. This is America, and it’s time to do things our way.

Love, Shannon

A Post So Informative It Should Be Narrated by Marlin Perkins and Sponsored by Mutual of Omaha

2006-06-06T21:56:00.000-04:00

Among the menagerie that Marty likes to keep in his bed while he sleeps is a beanie baby hedgehog that all of our children insist is a porcupine. I could understand this when we lived in Kentucky, because our zoo did not have a porcupine. However, now the kids have seen one in person several times, and still they will not admit that the hedgehog is not a porcupine. I know that I once saw a porcupine in person, during a trip to Maine – our great family vacation (which my sister Erin simultaneously missed and ruined as we like to frequently remind her). I guess it must have been a rather fleeting glimpse, because while I can picture the area where the porcupine was, I can’t for the life of me picture the porcupine. When I finally saw a porcupine this year at the Richmond zoo, I was quite shocked by its appearance, probably because I have spent the past 25 years looking at cartoon versions of porcupines, not photographs. I imagine that if the beanie baby was not equipped with a tag identifying it as a hedgehog, I would have agreed with the kids that it could be a porcupine.

Anyway, here is a porcupine. I decided that if I was going to cover porcupines in this post, I should find out a little more about them. Like many people, I can picture a cartoon porcupine rearing up and then snapping its backside in the air to send a shower of quills down on Yosemite Sam, but I wasn’t really sure if that was an accurate picture of reality. According to the Nature Works website, “The porcupine cannot shoot its quills. When a predator approaches, the porcupine will turn its back, raise the quills and lash out at the threat with its tail. If the porcupine hits an animal with its quills, the quills become embedded in the animal. Body heat makes the barbs expand and they become even more deeply embedded in the animal's skin.” Ouch. So now we all know. What I had no idea about was: “The common porcupine is a good swimmer, its hollow quills help keep it afloat. It is also an excellent tree-climber and spends much of its time in trees.” In the past when I have been in porcupine country, I assumed that they were hiding out in hollow logs with the other rodents and creepy crawlers. Little did I know they were looking down on me from above.

My porcupine investigation prompted me to try to remember all of the other wildlife encounters I’ve had. Since I am a girl who was raised in the city and who dislikes camping, I don’t have a huge array of stories to choose from (unless you count dead squirrels as wildlife). Of course I have seen squirrels and bunnies and chipmunks, but when it comes to animals that don’t regularly enter the garden/trash looking for food, I may as well have been raised in a concrete jungle. However, I can’t say that I wish I’d had more encounters. I like my animals caged up (I mean cared for by zoologists in a specially designed habitat that closely resembles the one the animals would enjoy in the wild).

In Kentucky I saw my first fox, and at first I couldn’t even identify it as a fox because I was so confused by how tall it was. I always figured that anything that was “as sly as a fox” would be close to the ground for better sneakiness. The fox I saw looked like a cat on stilts, and it was hanging around an empty warehouse area, which in cartoons is more of a cat haunt. The only fox I’ve seen on a regular basis lately is Swiper the Fox on Dora, and he is always on hind legs (and wearing a mask and gloves, so he is probably not a prime depiction of the species, although he is rather tall). According to Nature Works, “The red fox … is an omnivore and its diet includes fruits, berries and grasses … birds and small mammals like squirrels, rabbits and mice …invertebrates like crickets, caterpillars, grasshoppers, beetles and crayfish.” I guess one or more of those were probably in the abandoned warehouses, and I guess I should allow myself to stop worrying about foxes, because clearly I am too big for them to eat. Another interesting tidbit is that “The red fox will continue to hunt even when it is full. It stores extra food under leaves, snow or dirt.” Maybe this is why the Dora people made Swiper a fox, grabbing stuff that isn’t his and that he doesn’t need. (If foxes had a lobby, I’m sure they would have had Congress force Dora to make Swiper a more sympathetic animal. After all, it’s in his nature to hoard and they may be damaging his self esteem by depicting him as a bad guy.)

Several times when I was up late at night or early in the morning in Kentucky, I saw a skunk. Fortunately, I did not irritate the skunk, however, one weekend in New Jersey my in-law’s dog did while we were watching him. The skunk stink that you smell on the highway is an absolute delight compared to the skunk stink on a freshly sprayed dog. However, according to Nature Works (and Pepe Le Pew) skunks are really rather understanding: “When a skunk is threatened, it first tries to run away from the predator. If that doesn't work, it tries to frighten the predator by arching its back, raising its tail and turning its back on the predator. It may also stomp its feet. If this doesn't work, as a last resort, the skunk will spray the animal with a strong-smelling fluid.” I find it reassuring that a skunk will only spray you if you give it no other choice (and I suppose dogs really do give it no other choice), because since I am always willing to do what I can to get along maybe they won’t ever spray me.

Another animal I saw for the first time in Kentucky was a coyote. When my whole family was in town for Lauren’s baptism, my sisters’ and I were driving back on post through an open area when my sister Carroll said that she thought she saw a wolf standing on a hill near one of the gates to the post. We turned around and went back, and sure enough there was a mangy doglike beast standing up there. When we got home we were roundly mocked for mistaking a dog for a wolf, until my dad finally conceded that it was probably a coyote, and that the one he had encountered in person was also mangy and doglike. The second time I saw one was not quite so amusing, since I was alone on a deserted part of post on a Saturday. I had gone out for a walk and as I rounded a corner in the most remote part of my route, I looked to the side and saw a coyote at the bottom of a short hill, staring up at me. The worst part of this story is that as I approached the spot where I saw the coyote, an older Army man (probably a colonel of some sort since I was in their neighborhood) made a strange turn and started running in my direction. He ran right by me and said nothing, letting me find the coyote for myself. What an officer and a gentleman.

So did I have anything to fear from the coyote? Let’s ask Nature Works. The coyote is carnivorous and “Most of its diet is made up of mammals, but it also will eat birds and snakes. It prefers to eat fresh kill, but it will eat carrion. In the fall and winter, the coyote often eats fruits, vegetables and berries.” That is somewhat reassuring since I think it was still technically winter when I walked by it. However, then I read that “When hunting larger prey like deer, coyotes hunt in packs. One or more coyote will chase the deer while the others wait, then the next group will pick up the chase. Working in teams like this, the coyote can tire the deer out, making it easier to kill,” which makes me even more uneasy, since it’s possible I was in the presence of many coyotes ready to have me for lunch. Another bad sign is that “The coyote does most of its hunting alone and at night.” Why would a night time hunter hunt during the day? Because it has rabies. My goodness, I am lucky I made it out of there alive.

During one of my childhood outings to Gettysburg, we drove around hoping to catch sight of a deer. I am so old that this was back when deer were hard to spot, not grazing in everyone’s yard like some sort of urban cows. Just as we were about to give up and head home, I managed to spot one in the woods and we stopped the car so we could all get a look at nature. I don’t know if it sticks in my mind because I was so proud of myself for spotting it, or because it would be so ludicrous to try to find one now. Plant a flower and stand around for an hour or two, and you’ll soon be able to observe all the deer you want. Although Army posts are full of hunters, somehow the deer manage to outnumber them by greater margins every year. Whole families graze on people’s yards at dusk (and spread tics.

My favorite type of nature watching is from my chair while relaxing on the beach. One afternoon my sister and I saw what looked like a dog swimming along parallel to shore. It turned out to be a seal. According to the Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island web page, the scientific name of a harbor seal “loosely means ‘sea calf’ or ‘sea dog.’ This latter nickname is well suited as these seals closely resemble a dog when their head is viewed at the surface of the water.” So see everybody, it wasn’t the Bud Light, it was a seal and it did look like a dog. We’ve also seen dolphins and/or porpoises swimming and pelicans flying, and hopefully one day we’ll spot a whale.

I know whales are not really commonly seen along the coast of Delaware, although apparently they once were: “Right whales are no longer seen in certain inshore areas (where they once were common) such as Delaware Bay, Long Island, and in the Strait of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador.” When we were on our trip to Maine (the one that Erin missed and ruined) my dad took my brother and sister and I on a hike across a rocky beach to see the lighthouse on Campobello Island. My little brother was very upset that he had to stay behind, but while they were waiting for us to come back, he and my mom saw a whale. I believe their story, but when the HP and I were on Campobello on our honeymoon, every time we walked near the shoreline, all over the island, we were informed by people that we had just missed a whale. We began to think it was some sort of tourist racket, where they station people all over the island and pay them to say that the whale was just there so that tourists will stick around a little longer and spend a little more money.

And that’s it. I’ve never seen anything as big as a bear, I’ve never come across a raccoon or possum that wasn’t splattered on a roadway. Every so often I read a story about one wild animal or another making their way into a neighborhood, but those stories never end well for the animal, so I can’t wish for that sort of situation. I suppose if global warming was not a left wing tree hugger conspiracy, I could expect more reports of strange animal behavior in my lifetime, which would increase the likelihood that I would encounter one. After all, most wild animals are covered with fur, and when it gets hot enough, one or two of them will likely be smart enough to seek out some air conditioning.

Going Postal

2006-06-05T22:56:00.000-04:00

Today as I was standing outside watching Lauren learn the stops and starts of riding a bicycle with brakes, our mailman pulled up with a package for us (a package from daddy for Aislinn’s birthday). I guess it was insured or certified, because I needed to sign something, and as the mailman organized whatever papers he needed to give me, we had a little chat about Lauren riding the bike. When I told him that I had run over her tricycle, he said “Oh, so you had to go buy that one today I bet.” I told him that it was her sister’s bike that she was trying out to see if she was ready for a big bike. He then said “Well, my grandson is eight years old and he can’t ride a bike yet.” I wasn’t really sure what to make of that, but then he said “I found a brand new Huffy bike out at the curb on trash day because someone didn’t know how to put the chain back on.” I said “Wow, that’s strange,” and the mailman said, “Do you want it?”

Our mailman is very, very peculiar. He recently cut off his scraggily long grey ponytail, but still I get the impression that he may have smoked a little too much wacky tobbacky in his day. Whenever I meet him outside, he says odd things that I have to think about before I can answer, but before I am done thinking he has scurried off down the block. One day when I was in the kitchen concentrating on a recipe or something from one of the kids’ schools, the mailman rang the doorbell and startled me. When I looked through the storm door at him, he was pointing and laughing at me, “Hee Hee, I saw you jump! HEE HEE HEE!!” I was more puzzled than annoyed by that, but it strengthened my belief that he was a few cards short of a deck. We live on a corner of a t-intersection, and our house is at the end of our mailman’s route. The street that runs perpendicular to ours has a different mailman, who is the sort of mailman that the postal service would like you to imagine when you think of postal workers. He always waves and shouts hello to me, even though I’m not on his route. When we pass on the street he asks things like “How are you today?” or “Beautiful weather isn’t it?” not things like “Do you think that squirrel could outrun a bunny rabbit?”

Somehow, the fact that my mailman is nutty and the mailman right across the street is normal is pretty much an ideal metaphor for my life. The crazy people always end up on my block, on my airplane, at my officer’s wives coffees. Where are all the normal people and why am I never in a place where I would meet them? All over my neighborhood I see regular looking women pushing strollers and walking dogs. But somehow none of these regular looking people live near me. The woman next door has a mullet and fashions straight out of 1984, and she walks back and forth to the bus stop jabbering away on a hands free cell phone, like she is conducting important business (although not a single snippet of conversation I have heard sounds important or even coherent). The woman behind me has red hair that has been dyed two different colors (not because she’s edgy but because she probably didn’t realize they were different until she came out in the sunlight) and a huge tiger tattoo on her back. When I attempted to make small talk, she demanded to know if I worked, and when I said that I hadn’t for a while she asked “Were you a professional?” What sort of question is that? Why don’t I meet the women who say, “I love those shoes!” not “I’m going to stop working at the hospital so I can throw ‘passion parties.’?”

I know my sisters both think they can one-up me when it comes to stories of the crazy people we meet at bars or sporting events or just walking through parking lots, and I concede that the trophy for strangest encounter passes back and forth between us with some regularity. Shortly after my sister Erin posted this encounter, my sister Carroll forwarded me an e-mail she received inviting her to a meeting of NINO (“Nine In, Nine Out: a group of babywearing fans of all different types that have a common interest---wearing our children"). Whenever we go out together the combined force of our nutjob magnetism usually conjures up some drunk doofus who wants to sit down at our table and attempt to charm us, when all we want to do is have a drink and a little quiet.

Anyway, when the mailman offered me the bike he found in the trash, I didn’t know how to react, because if I said no, he might expect a reason why not, and I didn’t have one, so I said “Sure, if you don’t want it.” Now this awkward situation is out there, waiting for a resolution. In a perfect world, the mailman will drop off the bike tomorrow and I can thank him, and that will be the end of it. But what if he doesn't? What if he keeps telling me about it but never brings (similar to the way my boss kept telling me he was buying me a wedding present and never did, what a jackass, but I digress...) and the situation is never resolved? What if the bike is too big for my kids, and then they can't use it, and then wonders why I accepted it if we weren't going to use it? Hopefully he won't ask why we're not using it, but what will I say if he does?

And that right there is probably why the odd birds will always think they’ve found a friend in me. I don’t want to hurt their feelings or make them feel uncomfortable, so I make myself uncomfortable instead. Presumably while I am accommodating the nutty faction, the members of the regular stroller pushing and dog walking faction are meeting and making plans and moving on without me. I guess there are other explanations to my situation which I haven’t really considered. Obviously, the problem could be that I am such a weirdo that the normal people on the block are avoiding me. The problem could be that the normal looking people that stroll by with their kiddies and dogs are actually raving lunatics that manage to pull off the “normal look,” and if I met them I'd find them as crazy as the mullet-headed tattooed types I normally attract. The problem could be that the people I consider odd are actually considered normal by the rest of the general population. The problem could be that I have no idea what normal is since I spend my days surrounded by my kids who are definitely looking at the world from a different angle.

However, probably the most likely reason I attract the wacky element of society is that if they are nice, I will be friendly to them. I spent nine years (counting kindergarten) in a toxic, clique-infested grade school, and it scarred me to the point that I am absolutely opposed to leaving anyone out. One day (back when I was a professional) a coworker invited me to go out for drinks after work, which I thought was nice, until she added “We are asking all of the cool people to go.” That was a dealbreaker for me. Since college my new rule of thumb has been that if cool people need someone to exclude, I’ll always volunteer to be excluded. I don’t want to be on the inside looking at the “losers” outside (to a degree that it is almost my life philosophy). After wasting so much of my childhood worrying about whether I was ever going to be in the cool crowd, I can’t even stand the thought of being a part of it now. I'm definitely not some sort of saintly person, I'm really not even what people would consider very nice, but at least I can claim that I am inclusive and that I don't rule out friendship without a reason(except of course with Jason Kennedy, the producers of ER and Grey's Anatomy, terrorists, and the guy who came to remove the dead squirrel last Friday).

Updates #2

2006-06-04T22:06:00.000-04:00

Yes, I know 1500 words is a lot to expend on any one topic, and I know that I have covered most of these topics in excruciating detail from every possible angle, but every one loves a little update don't they? Don't you love that part of the movie Miracle when they tell what all the hockey players are doing now?

A Disgusting Post About Dead Squirrels

On Friday afternoon (day 2 of squirrel episode #2), after I had completed all of my errands and picked up the kids and when I knew that I would be home for at least the next three hours, I placed my call to the MP desk again to find out what more I needed to do to bring about removal of the squirrel. “Hello,” I began in a most polite manner, “I called yesterday about a dead squirrel near my house…”

“Yes,” said the same dispatcher I spoke to the day before.

“Well, no one came out to get the squirrel, so I was just wondering….”

“WHAT? No one came out there? Don’t worry, I’ll send someone out right now.”

“Oh, okay, thanks a lot.”

So, it turns out I did not need to prepare myself for battle to get the squirrel removed, but I did have to call a second time. The seargeant that took the call made it pretty clear to me that dead squirrel removal was within their area of responsibility, so I felt better, thinking it was just an oversight and not a sign that the squirrel removers thought my request was stupid. At least I thought that until the squirrel remover arrived.

He pulled up in an unmarked pick up truck and began wandering around the front yard, apparently hoping he could spot the squirrel and take it without ever having to deal with me. I found my shoes and went outside to meet him, just as he was coming to the door.

“You called about a squirrel?” he asked in a rather condescending manner, as if he could barely stand speaking to me.

“Yes, it’s in the back, I’ll show you.”

We went to the back of the house, where another squirrel darted out and startled me, I’m sure removing whatever miniscule amount of respect I could have expected from this guy. I pointed out the squirrel and stepped back so he could go to work.

The first thing he did was squat down and poke the corpse with his bare hand.

“I don’t know if he electrocuted himself or what,” I said, attempting to make conversation.

“I don’t know either, but he is dead.” Apparently he had poked the squirrel on the off chance that it was Squirrel Van Winkle, just taking a little two-day siesta draped over my cable wires. Or maybe he thought that I was confused and it had only been there for two minutes rather than two days. Then, to my disgusted astonishment, he picked it up with two bare fingers and held it up, turning it this way and that, looking for evidence of I don’t know what. He stood up, and started walking back to his truck with the squirrel in hand.

“Thanks a lot,” I called after him.

“Yeah,” he said without even turning back in my direction. He tossed the remains in the back of his pickup and got in the front seat where he took off his hat and drove away. I guess he is so rugged that he doesn’t mind that he was spreading squirrel cooties all over himself and his hat and his truck. Whatever.

Thinking back, the guy did not have a uniform shirt on, just some sort of t-shirt that had some sort of hunting thing on it. I suppose that it is possible that he works for the hunting office on post, but given his manner, I suppose it is also possible that he is some random weirdo who listens to the police scanner in hopes of hearing a report of a still warm animal corpse (deer, possum, raccoon, skunk) that he can fry up with some onions. Although he could barely stand the fact that I was too girly to pick up a two-day old squirrel corpse, something tells me the little lady waiting at home to fry that thing up was not a roadkill retriever when he met her.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor and The Housing’s Mighty Fine

For about five hours today, the little girl who lived next door was in my house, playing with the girls, messing up basically every room, and eating lunch and several snacks. I like when another kid comes over to play, because although the house is usually a mess when she leaves, at least the kids leave me alone for a while. Plus, this little neighbor is the one with the trampoline that we use on a regular basis while she is holed up at after school care. I don’t mind entertaining her every now and then since she has been so generous with her trampoline. Once the girls had played with every toy on the inside, they went outside to throw and chase a Frisbee (I suppose one day it may morph into a game of catch, but none of them have the aim for such a sport right now). After about five minutes the girls came running inside to inform me that the Frisbee was on the roof.

We have a ranch house, so I thought I might be able to reach the Frisbee with a broom, but it was too far back on the roof. I went in and got the step stool to give it another try, but I still didn’t have any luck. As I was contemplating what to do next, a high school kid out riding his bike stopped and asked if we needed any help. He wasn’t much bigger than me, but I figured I should encourage his impulse to stop and help people. He climbed up on the stool and managed to reach the Frisbee with the broom, but since our roof is tar covered with pebbles (I have no idea why - none), he couldn’t get it to slide down the roof. Undaunted he climbed up onto our air-conditioning unit so he could get a little more leverage and managed to get the Frisbee down. The kids and I thanked him profusely, and he gave us a wave as he got back on his bike and rode off down the street. Thinking back on it now, I remember he was wearing a clean white (baseball) hat, like the good guys always do.

So Much for Being Nice

Since it aired, I have discovered that the most upsetting part of the Grey’s Anatomy finale was not that it was horrible and ridiculous and ludicrous and insulting to a degree that it took points off of my IQ. The most upsetting part was that when I did a Google search of other blogs so that I could read some other peoples’ trashing of the episode, all I could find were rave reviews from people who loved it. Everyone had a tale of the tears in their eyes when the heart guy kicked the bucket and how beautiful everyone looked in their prom dresses. Ew. I guess that is further proof that I will never be a TV programming executive.

Stumped

Somehow I have failed to finish in the money in the great spring cleanup contest on post. The first and third place yards are cattycorner to each other right when you enter our housing area. I have seen these people at work on their yards constantly, and both yards look very nice. However, both of them have riding mowers that can also suck up leaves, so I think they are somehow overly qualified for the yard competition. If prizes were awarded based upon impact per dollar spent, I think my three bags of mulch, 8 petunias, 3 grass plants, and I would be sitting pretty.

However, the third place yard was always the first place yard, until the people in the new first place yard moved in and spent even more time edging and planting and pruning. I happened to be walking by for the first face off after the signs had been awarded (and maybe it’s just me, but the first place sign seemed to be angled for maximum impact when the third place people came out of their front door). “Congratulations,” the winner called to the third placer just a little too sweetly. “Congratulations to you, too,” the third placer called back just a little too generously. Oh the intrigue, something tells me the winners may have riding mower donuts on their lawn in the morning.

Flockin’ Robins

My parents’ new house is a wonderland of nice TVs and couches, two of the HPs favorite inanimate objects. If there were a few additional refrigerators, I imagine he might chain himself to the banister and go AWOL in July. However, as I was sitting with my dad enjoying the new porch, I noticed a little something perched on the roof above my parents’ bedroom. Soon I was being treated to a nonstop “Coo Coo Coo,” from the HP’s nemesis, the mourning dove.

“That thing sits up there all day,” my dad said, “I think you’d better tell Rob to bring his weapon with him.”

A Disgusting Post About Dead Squirrels

2006-06-01T22:48:00.000-04:00

Last December when my brother and sister came for a visit, there was a disgusting stench all through our end of the block. I had literally stuck my head inside the trash can to look for a source, but I concluded that whatever was causing the smell was not my problem. Unfortunately I was wrong. When I published my first dissertation on yardwork and mowing the lawn, I left out one little detail of the ordeal, one little incident that haunted me for weeks afterward. As I mowed along in the back of the house, close to the border of no man’s land, where no one is really responsible for the grass, but within the area I had designated as my responsibility, I came upon the corpse of a squirrel. The look on what was left on his face was rather angry and frightening, but in his condition it was impossible to tell if he really had been that mad when he expired. I quickly turned the mower and headed in the other direction, but every time I came near it I caught a whiff of that awful smell (at least I thought I did, but it may have been psychosomatic), so eventually I just abandoned that part of the lawn and went to mow somewhere else.

Later that morning, when the extremely helpful “mayor” of our housing area came by with plastic bags for spring cleanup (“Now these are for the common areas, not for you”) I asked her if there was an animal control on post that usually picked up dead animals. Her tremendously useful advice was to call my husband. I thought he might be a little far flung for squirrel removal, so I did whatever I could to make her leave (threw the bags in the bushes, waved, restarted the mower) and continued on until all but a small patch in the backyard had been mowed.

Since the spot where the squirrel lay was far from the house and in an area where the children never played, I figured none of them was going to discover it before I came up with a way to get rid of it. Under no circumstances was I going to attempt to remove it, since it looked like it had been there so long, there was some likelihood that it would disintegrate as I tried to pick it up and make an even bigger mess. Every afternoon as I sat with the kids at the playground or trampoline, I would occasionally gaze over at the clump of grass where I knew the squirrel remains remained. If I was a soap opera character, these occasions would have been perfect for the fuzzy slow motion memory sequences, showing me repeatedly turning away in horror at the grisly scene in the grass.

The next time I mowed the grass, the patch around the squirrel was about 8 inches long and growing. My father-in-law was arriving later in the day to visit, and I knew if I asked him to he would get a shovel and get rid of the squirrel, but I really didn’t want to ask him to, because I really didn’t want to ask anyone to. I know some of the neighbors, but none of them seem like the hunting, camping, outdoorsy type (ironic for a military housing area isn’t it?). In Kentucky my next door neighbor was a real outdoorsman, always taking his boys out to hunt and fish and hike and camp. I would have gone running to him in a second, because he probably could have looked at the squirrel, determined how long it had been there, and then executed a flawless plan to remove every trace of him. Fortunately for me and my father-in-law, on the day in question one of the maintenance crew had come to replace my storm door handle. When he was done, he came over to where I was mowing the lawn and asked if there was anything else he could do for me. So I took a chance and told him about the squirrel. “Well, let’s take a look,” he said. When I showed him the body, he said, “He’s been there a good long time.” And then he reached down with his bare hand and picked the thing up with two fingers and carried it off toward his truck. I thanked him profusely and briefly wondered if I should offer him some Purell, but he climbed back in his truck and drove off.

I don’t think I can properly explain the relief and happiness I felt when that squirrel was gone. The stress of finding a way to get rid of it, as well as the stress of making sure the kids didn’t discover it was removed in one fell swoop by a maintenance man who probably couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t just picked the thing up myself. I got the mower back out and mowed the little patch where the squirrel had been, and I was ready to put the squirrel episode behind me. After all, how many times do you find a squirrel corpse in your yard?

Unfortunately for me, the answer is now twice, in two months. Earlier this week I bought some peppers to roast, because roasted peppers are a specialty of the HP which I am sorely missing in his abscence. I went out to start the grill this morning, and there, right next to the house, draped across what I believe are some cable wires, is another squirrel corpse. Clearly, this one cannot be ignored. I called the housing office, but they referred me to the MPs (there is no number for animal control here the way there was in Kentucky). I called the MPs and they took my request for corpse removal, not indicating that it was not within their responsibilities and not indicating that there was anything strange about my request.

Why can’t I just remove the squirrel myself since it is clearly a new body and would presumably come up in one piece if I tried to get it with a shovel? Because I don’t know why it is dead. It is draped across the cable wires, which I know are not exactly power lines, but what if one of them was hot enough to kill the squirrel? Should I stick my shovel in there to find out? What if he had rabies or west nile virus or some other crazy disease. Should I just poke around in there anyway and figure if I wash my hands all will be well? Where exactly would I put the remains for the next 5 ninety degree days before the trash is picked up again? I certainly would not put them in my trash can because I’m sure the trash can would never be the same - I would be the cause of the stench next December.

Although I have sung the praises of the gate guards, they are different from the MPs. It is safe to say that thanks to the gate guards, this is not a hotbed of crime. In fact the only “crime” that occurs with any regularity is speeding. So how does the MP force spend its time? In four man speed traps that set up near the housing areas and day care center. I have not had many dealings with the MPs since I drive the speed limit. But from what I have observed, there is a spare man at the speed traps that could drop by my house and remove the squirrel. I spent all morning and a good part of the afternoon at the house, waiting for the MPs so that I could show them where to find the squirrel. No one came. My previously described Irish temper is beginning to spin again. I will be calling tomorrow to rerequest the removal of the squirrel corpse, this time providing an extensive description of the situation and why I will not be handling it myself (and why my husband will not be handling it). I am gearing up for a battle that may not occur, which is stressful for me, because I’m more of an “everything will work out” kind of girl. But I am starting to suspect that my request was ignored because the MPs think it is stupid. I don’t care what they think, if dead squirrel removal is in their job description, they should come remove the dead squirrel or get another job (I know, I’m such a bad ass). (It’s like the indignant workers at a return desk at a store asking you to explain why you are returning something. “I’m returning it because I don’t like it, and by returning it I help make sure you can keep your job at the return desk.”) If the squirrel remains are not removed tomorrow, you will all be hearing about it I can assure you.

Do you want to know what the saddest thing about this dead squirrel post is? I have a list of other gross squirrel stories that I jotted down in case I needed extra stuff to get to 1500 words. Should any one person (who does not own a copy of the “White Trash Cookbook”) be able to discuss dead squirrels at such length? No, America, she should not.

Showdown at the Shopping Mall

2006-05-31T22:08:00.000-04:00

Last night I witnessed a rather horrifying spectacle on TV, that I believe should have been reviewed by my sister since she is much better at mocking TV shows than I am. Since she has remained silent on the matter (hopefully because she did not watch it) I must describe for you the following offering from E! Entertainment Television: To Have and To Hold: Last Bride Standing. First, I must admit that I only saw about 45 minutes of this show which is apparently an hour and a half long. Forty-five minutes is more than enough, especially since anyone who has attempted to watch anything on E! knows that it is the only channel on TV that is organized with commercials interrupted by programming breaks rather than the other way around. Strangely, most of the commercials are for other E! programs that will also be brief episodes between commercials. But I digress…

When I flipped onto the E! channel, I beheld a group of women standing in a gazebo in what looked like an outdoor shopping center. The women were arranged in a circle and each of them had a hand on a huge wedding dress. Even I was able to quickly surmise that they were in a contest to win some sort of wedding prize. I didn’t see the opening scrum, so I don’t know who the contestants were or how they were chosen for this great endeavor. I don’t know how many women started up there under the gazebo, but when I turned it on, the remaining brides-to-be had been standing up there for 24 hours.

I had to find out more. It was about 8:45 when I turned it on, so I figured it would all be over within 10 minutes. But 9:00 came and went, and I realized I was in for another 30 minutes of excruciating anticipation. The show was hosted by a box of hammers named Jason Kennedy, who jabbered away nonstop, and had a serious manner as if he were overseeing international peace treaty negotiations rather than a stupid bride stunt in a shopping mall. He was in constant communication with the secret surveillance booth staffed by people who are apparently experts at staring at a TV. Every so often he would lean to the side and press on his earpiece like a reporter in a war zone and then in somber tones throw the show to commercial with the news that the TV watchers needed review tape to see if one of the unlucky brides had taken her hand off the dress.

When I turned the show on, each of the brides was wearing a pair of pointy white high heel shoes and holding a garter in her hand. The shoes were apparently not a part of the contest at the beginning, they were added later to make the brides more uncomfortable and encourage them to let go of the dress. Some of the brides were wearing socks with the shoes, but I’m not sure if that was a personal choice, or if they had to wear socks because they had started the contest with socks. The garters I later realized were trotted out each time Jason Kennedy (the pile of rocks) came by to offer them a prize that they could have if they let go of the dress. When he was done describing the great prize, he instructed them to hold the garters over their heads, and once he had counted to three (no small accomplishment for him) the first bride to drop the garter would win the prize. The first garter I saw drop was in the hands of a lesbian bride-to-be, and her fiancée, while not particularly scary looking, definitely looked mad that her fiancée had chosen the trip over the dress (and not to be mean, but she should have turned in the $10,000 dress for some dental work).

The remaining contestants included a cute blond single mom, a cute blond hard ass bitch who was supposed to seem sympathetic because her mother and brother were deaf, a 60-year-old who “found love late in life” (a regular 60-year old, not one of those hot Goldie Hawn 60-year olds), a cute weepy chubby girl who had lost 50 pounds for her wedding and was attempting to lose 50 more, and a few other girls who eventually took their hands off the dress, so I don’t really remember what they looked like or what their stories were, because this show was focused on WINNERS.

When Jason Kennedy (running with scissors) next came up to the gazebo, he was holding a pile of boxes which he explained were 10 inches by 12 inches (“I good at geomometry”). The poor exhausted brides were to stand on these boxes, in their high heels, while holding onto the dress, and if they lifted their hands from the dress or their feet from the box, they were through. This brought about another round of uncontrolled weeping from the chubby girl, who I actually felt bad for because I thought she might be carted off to the funny farm if the show went on much longer. She had a harder time keeping her hand on the dress than the other girls, because she had to keep wiping away the makeup that was running down her face.

In case you are wondering how the brides could possibly stand up there for so long without a break, don’t worry, they didn’t. Every so often an air horn would blow (I’m not sure if Jason Kennedy had responsibility for that since he was already in charge of walking and talking at the same time) and the brides would retire to their corners like boxers. Their loved ones would rub their feet and open their granola bars and whisper words of encouragement or growl stern words to “not give up.” The loved ones were much more competitive than the actual brides, and none of them appeared to be the sort of people that you would want to spend a great deal of time with. Perhaps that is why the host did not spend much time interviewing them (that and he already had all those trips up and down the gazebo stairs to concentrate on).

In case you are wondering how anyone could possibly sit and watch a bunch of exhausted weepy women wriggle uncomfortably and hold a dress, don’t worry, there’s more. To fill time between the host’s trips to the gazebo, the producers showed montages of celebrity wedding stuff that they obviously took from other E! Entertainment specials. Since no major celebrities really want E! Entertainment at their weddings, the montages basically included candid pictures of celebrities (sitting in cars or walking the red carpet) interspersed with pictures of buildings that the celebrities apparently did wedding stuff inside. Fascinating.

Not to ruin it for you, but the 60-year old bride was the next bride to drop her garter and claim a vacation prize. She said she was very proud of herself for standing up there with girls who were less than half her age. I think she would have been prouder if she had avoided the contest all together, but if she wants to think she has made a stand for 60-year old women, I’m not going to take that away from her. The next bride to drop the garter was the single mom, who was probably the only one in the contest with the looks and body to pull off an enormous designer wedding gown. Two other girls were eliminated which set the stage for the showdown between the weepy chubby girl and the hard ass bitch. At the last break when the girls were in their corners, both used the phrase “It’s on now!” but when they got back up under the gazebo, the chubby one immediately started weeping again as the host told them over and over again that one of them would go home with nothing, Nothing, NOTHING and one of them would go home with a $10,000 dress and “everything that goes with it” whatever that means. Finally, the weepy girl lost and the bitchy girl claimed the dress. In later footage, they showed her trying on the dress, and she looked, as expected, like she was acting out the “I’m Being Swallowed by a Boa Constrictor (Enormous Designer Wedding Dress)” song. After Jason Kennedy (his accomplishments listed on the E! website included interviewing Paris Hilton – need I say more) asked the weepy girl how it felt to win NOTHING, to go through all that pain for NOTHING, to put forth all that effort for NOTHING, he told her that they were giving her a $6,000 vacation for being such a trooper. She is going to need it if she wants to avoid putting that 50 pounds back on. She needs therapy.

All I could think was “Really? The dress? You’d do all this for a fancy dress that you’ll wear one time? Really???” If I had been in some sort of industrial accident that required the removal of part of my brain and in my foggy existence I had somehow stumbled into an appearance on Last Bride Standing, I would have dropped my garter for the first trip they offered. What people who are not yet married don’t realize is that nobody cares about the dress. Everyone is looking at your face and how happy you are. A few people may tell you that day that they like your dress, but the next day, no one will really remember what it looked like. And then, what do you do with it? Have it framed and hung on the wall? No, you put it in a closet and then in 25 years you offer it to your daughter (if you have one) who, if by some miracle is the same size as you and gets married in the same season as you, would more than likely rather pick a dress of her own.

Many of the weepy brides said that they would never be able to afford that sort of dress without the contest, and I’m sure that is true. However, none of them seemed like they could afford a cool honeymoon either, and I can’t imagine throwing a chance at a great trip away so that you can have a crazy expensive dress. Wouldn’t it be better to start out your marriage by choosing something that both you and your future husband can share? I guess by posing that question I have revealed that I am not destined for greatness as a TV programmer. Clearly the experts at E! know what they are doing, because they even got me to watch it. In my defense I was exhausted, but I wasn’t so exhausted that I couldn’t have flipped away from the show. Maybe the people who put the E! in entertainment know that the audience doesn’t care about the contest, they just want to feel smarter than the people in the contest (and the astoundingly idiotic host – I wonder who reminds him to get dressed in the morning).

2000 Words on Why I Am Not a World Famous Artist, Musician, or Athelete

2006-05-30T23:15:00.000-04:00

My view of the debate between private and public schools has always been colored by the fact that I attended only private Catholic schools, from kindergarten right through college. When I was growing up as a DC resident, if your parents could somehow afford any alternative to the public schools, they would always take it. I was so sure that public schools were a ticket to nowhere, that I was shocked to find that large numbers of my classmates in college (including almost all of my friends) had been to public school and had managed to come out without a drug problem, a criminal record, or an unwanted pregnancy. For most of my life, I assumed I would send my kids to private schools because public schools in my mind had a sort of hopelessness about them. However, my daughter now attends a public school, and her sister will go with her next fall.

I don’t know if they will always be in public school, but I have already found a way in which our local public school is far superior to the private schools I attended: the music, art, and physical education teachers are actually trained professionals who are trying to teach children things about music, art, and PE. I had always assumed that music, art, and PE were taught by failed musicians, artists, and losers who had no other way to earn a paycheck so they gave up and became teachers. Angry teachers. Teachers who hated teaching and children.

When my daughter arrived home from her first day of school this fall, she could not have been any happier with her music teacher. She talked about him from the moment she got off the bus until she finally fell asleep. Every Wednesday after that, she would arrive home with another story of how funny her music teacher was, what silly thing he had done that day to help teach them a song or a concept about music. The school year is almost over, and she still loves to tell what happened in music class because she finds her teacher so much fun. He throws himself into his work, making faces, marching around, throwing things, and basically doing whatever it takes to get the kids to participate. As I have previously mentioned, life at my house is one long floor show, and in the back of my mind I have always worried that some embittered crackpot music teacher was going to ruin everything and turn my children against music.

My first music teacher was Sister Annette Cecile, who was as old as the hills when I was in kindergarten, and still she lasted right on past my eighth grade graduation. She would only teach the little kids however, so for the next seven years, I had probably seven different music teachers. All of them eventually broke down in tears in front of the class or disappeared for a long vacation because something about dealing with us made them start to twitch all over. I know kids can be obnoxious, but usually I remember being puzzled by the crying. I never understood why what seemed like the regular amount of bad behavior was so much worse to the music teachers. Probably it had something to do with the fact that while the kids were acting up, they were also not learning or even attempting to learn anything. However, in this instance I blame the teachers. Why should a bunch of six graders have to sit in chairs once a week and sing “The Streets of Laredo” – just because it’s in the music book? Every one of those music teachers had a closet full of instruments, and if they had just passed them out and let us play along, I’m sure they would have found us much more willing to participate.

When I was in high school, every freshman had a trimester of chorale, which was a nun sitting at a piano and urging, begging, and finally attempting to threaten us into singing. It never worked. She played the piano and called out our names to sing solo, and every time she was met with absolute silence. That probably explains why everyone only got three months of chorale during their high school career. After finally working our way through chorale, we were rewarded with three months of “String Experience.” Somehow the nuns had decided that every student could learn to play the violin (or viola or cello) in one trimester, so they kept a huge closet full of instruments so that every freshman girl could get her turn. Once again, we were treated to a nun sitting at the piano as we attempted to play along on our instruments. She was a very happy tone-deaf nun who always shouted “Wonderful girls!” over the screeching of the strings. The only time I saw her upset was at final exam time, when each of us had to play a song (and not a song like “Twinkle, Twinkle” – a song that used every string and finger pattern that she had attempted to teach us). None of us could play it, and she was flabbergasted at how we could have failed to master our instrument when we had the opportunity to play it for forty minutes once a week for three months.

I was equally astonished when my daughter came home from her first day of art class telling me all about Piet Mondrian. Actually, she was calling him Pia Pondrian, but even if she had provided me with the correct pronunciation and spelling, I would have had no idea what she was saying or who she was talking about. Finally, she got out a ruler and some red, yellow, and blue crayons and created a Mondrian prototype for me. Later in the fall she drew a mountain landscape so that she could show me what was in the foreground, the midground, and the background. During the winter they were working on Sumi-e paintings, which Aislinn also had to demonstrate before I knew what she was talking about.

Here is what I learned about art in grade school: if you act up during art class, Miss Bernice will hit you on the head with scissors. Ah, Miss Bernice, the tiny, angry import from Italy who ruled the art room at Blessed Sacrament School with an iron fist (well, iron scissors anyway, as I previously mentioned) for my entire eight years. Every year we did the same pictures: a brown, orange, and yellow fall scene made with construction paper; a snowy winter scene created by flicking white tempera paint from a toothbrush; and finally, the grand finale - cherry blossom pictures made with pink tempera paint and sponges. My mother has told me that Miss Bernice wanted everyone’s pictures to look the same, and she could always tell what we had been forced to add to our pictures. I was so busy attempting to understand what Miss Bernice was saying and trying to stay out of her way, that none of the actual art part of art class sticks out in my mind. In those days, if anyone had asked my opinion of whether there was enough art in the schools, I’m sure I would have said there was too much art in the schools. I would have proposed that surely one class per year to churn out cherry blossom pictures for Catholic Schools Week would suffice.

In high school, I had an art teacher who probably could have taught me something about art, but in my four years of high school I had exactly one trimester of art - three months out of four years. I know other students had more art, but somehow I think those of us that were shoved into honors chemistry and extra Latin were discouraged from attempting anything creative. I think art was kept as a sort of consolation prize for the girls that the nuns thought probably were not going to get by on their smarts. Looking back, that philosophy is almost as upsetting as the glowering face of Miss Bernice as she stormed across the room to put an end to excessive paste application.

But the true crazies lurk in the gymnasium. My daughter is not too fond of her PE teachers, because they yell a lot. I’m sure some of the yelling is necessary, and some of it probably isn’t, because I have seen her teachers and they do look a little mean. However, they have been teaching her things that have improved not only her coordination and flexibility, but her confidence in what she is able to do, whether it is climbing or jumping rope. When I can get her to talk about any aspect of PE other than her teachers’ mean faces, she always describes a new game they have taught her or a new skill they are working on.

My grade school PE experience can be summed up in two words: murder ball. I don’t even know if murder ball is a real game, and I’m sure that someone complained about the name, because eventually it became known as “Greek Dodge Ball” (but I don’t think the Greeks will want to claim it either). My PE teacher's name was Ms. Body, and she was a tan, forty or fifty-something lady who would arrive to the gym late in a sweatsuit and keds, pass out the four-square balls, and then retire to the stage of the gym to smoke while we played yet another round of murder ball. Once a year she would open up the closet where the other PE equipment was kept, and we would have relay races and play jump rope or shoot baskets. Twice a week for the rest of the year, it was murder ball.

When I started high school, I missed murder ball, because my PE teacher was one of the craziest people I have ever encountered (in fact, she deserves 1500 words of her own, so I will keep this part short). She had escaped from eastern Europe right before the iron curtain fell, but I think it may have delivered a glancing blow as she ducked underneath it (actually, the story was that she lost her mind in a car accident). We had to take notebooks to every gym class so that we could record the rules for whatever sport we were working on – rules that she was obviously making up off the top of her head. We had to take ridiculous tests, like the cartwheel off the balance beam test, the forwards and backwards jumprope tricks test, and the ten free throws in a row test (ask most professional basketball players if they’d pass that one). Whenever we played individual sports, like table tennis (her personal favorite) whoever won a match would get an A and whoever lost would get an F. As freshmen we were very upset by this policy, but we soon realized that she had no idea who any of us were or what our names were, so she would just assign everyone a letter grade in a random manner at the end of each trimester.

Looking back, those twelve years in private schools provided me with an excellent academic education. However, those twelve years cured me (for a long time) of any interest in pursuing art or music on my own, just because it might be enjoyable (while my experiences in PE were bizarre, giving up all physical activity never seemed a possibility). All of the joy in those pursuits was removed by teachers in private schools who could not be removed. As long as they were willing to come to work and not beat (excessively) on the children, they were invited back year after year. When I took a painting class about 10 years ago, I found some drawings that I had done as a kid. They were not award winning, but they weren’t bad, and I suddenly remembered that I had really enjoyed art as a kid. I had sat on my bed to color and draw just because it was fun, not because I had too. Hopefully, my kids will always feel that way too about art and music, and hopefully no crazy teacher will change their minds.

Lessons at 6 Months

2006-05-29T22:30:00.000-04:00

This weekend we finally celebrated the half way point of the HP’s deployment. When he first deployed, it seemed as if time would never start to pass. We had the holidays to distract us in December, but when Christmas was over, he still hadn’t been gone for a month. January took forever. February was a little quicker, but only because it is so short (thank goodness it wasn’t a leap year). Now, somehow, by putting one foot in front of the other like the Winter Warlock, we have finally found the halfway point. I will not attempt to describe here what the Afghanistan half of this experience has been. While I may be saddled with all the responsibility for the three little nutjobs, at least I have them here, within arms reach, whenever I need a little cheering up. But I think I should take a moment to describe what the homefront experience has been, because in some ways, it has not turned out at all like I expected. I have learned some lessons about life in general and about the people who love us.

Anyone who reads this blog will not be surprised to learn that the first lesson I have learned is: All yard work and trash duty should be assigned to men. As I have repeatedly described in this blog, I have never had any interest in yard work. Now that I have had a turn to push the mower out there under the blue sky and spring breezes, I still have no interest in yard work. I am still baffled by the people in the neighborhood who water their yards, encouraging the grass to grow, as if they can’t wait to cut it again. I hate trying to dig holes to put flowers in, I hate attempting to identify poison ivy, and I hate the squirrel corpse I found in the back yard. I hate having to remember trash day and having to roll that huge can back and forth to the curb. I hate that the recycling must be put out on a different day from the trash, and I hate that the recycling truck is really a trailer pulled by a trash truck, showing that on some level, no one really gives a crap whether you recycle stuff or not.

Lesson Number 2: When my family said they would be there with anything we needed, they meant it. My in-laws have made the seven hour trip to Virginia to spend half a week with us for five out of six months (and they only skipped a month because we went to their house). They have arrived every time with a dinner ready to go on the stove and a cake ready to go for the kids. They have painted things, fixed things, performed all manner of chores that I dislike (like pushing swings), encouraged me to go shoe shopping (well maybe that wasn’t exactly what they said), as well as provided me with a much appreciated break from the weekday routine. My parents have welcomed us to disrupt their quiet beachside existence on a monthly basis and turned their second floor into our home away from home. My dad has happily put aside his paper to dish out Froot Loops and milk every morning that we are there, and my mom has tirelessly come up with things for the kids to play or learn or bake. Both of my parents have assembled more puzzles, sat through more impromptu dance performances, and listened to more rambling stories than even I would be willing to do.

My sisters and brothers and their families have called, e-mailed, visited, or welcomed us into their homes help me fill the weekends with activities to distract the kiddies. One of my sisters got us tickets to see the circus and to see the baby panda at the National Zoo (and let all of us stay in her studio apartment more than once, I’m sure to the detriment of her typical sleep schedule). My other sister has made the five hour journey to see us with three kids of her own in tow or invited us to stay with them, so that the cousins could play and I could have someone to complain to. My sister-in-law has made countless trips to our house with a bag of candy under one arm and presents under the other, untiringly pulling the kids around in the wagon to every playground within walking distance and insisting on doing every domestic chore in my house unless I strong-arm her into a chair with a cold beverage. All of the grandparents and aunts and uncles have put up with endless phone calls from the kiddies who are desperate to talk to someone besides me, and all of them have cheerily endured countless hours of holding one of our kiddies on their laps when I can’t take one more minute of togetherness. In addition, everyone has sent boxes and e-mails and cards to the HP, so that I don’t feel like I have to run to the post office every week. Everyone is doing what they can to make sure that he knows that we think of him every day and we appreciate what he’s doing.

Lesson Number 3: Physical and mental exhaustion helps you sleep. When the HP used to go away for work, I would always have trouble sleeping, and typically would end up dozing on the couch with the TV and lights on every night until he came home. I have a very well-developed sense of paranoia from growing up in what was once the murder capitol of the world, and my overactive imagination can provide me with endless home invasion scenarios. Now I am lucky if I can get my teeth brushed before I fall into bed for a seven-hour coma. I know the HP worked full time before he left, but apparently I was quite reliant on his nightly contribution to carrying the children around and listening to them. Some nights I beg them to just be quiet and watch TV, because I can’t possibly answer one more question like “Are film and batteries the same thing?” and I can’t possibly remove them from the coffee table one more time. When they are finally in bed for the night, an hour can pass as I sit on the couch and attempt to muster the energy to microwave myself a little dinner.

Lesson Number 4: Being a single parent stinks. I can’t say that I really know what it is like to be a single mother because I am not alone. The HP was such an involved and dedicated daddy, that he is still here with us in spirit although he is not here in person. The kiddies can come up with a story about him in a moment’s notice (including one I keep hearing about him running through a red light, which I will have to investigate further in July while he is home on leave), and I can summon him as an parenting ally merely by saying “What do you think daddy would say about that?” But as far as buckling the car seats, packing the lunches, remembering the book orders, and all the day to day drudgery of dishes, laundry, baths, meals, and fingernail grooming, I am on my own. Being on my own is not fun. Single mothers out there, I don’t know how you do it, but I am amazed and intimidated that anyone can do it for a few months let alone for a lifetime.

Lesson Number 5: Our kiddies are awesome. I was prepared for a lot of drama, bad behavior, and tantrums from the kiddies, not because they typically do these things, but because surely they would have to act out their frustration at being deprived of their daddy for a year. Instead, they have behaved like little heroes. All of them have had their moments of crying, and missing daddy, and feeling sad that they can’t have daddy here, but all of them have let me cheer them up and have been willing to carry on with their daily routine (go to school, eat their meals, go to bed on time so mommy can have a drink). They have accepted the fact that they will have to wait until July to see daddy again with a more mature attitude than I can muster sometimes. They love to talk to him on the phone and watch the videos of him reading books and they like to check with me throughout the day to try to figure out his day “Is daddy asleep right now? Is he having breakfast? Is he at work or in bed?” I hate that my two-year-old can say “My daddy is in Affanistan,” but he does it with such calmness and such assurance that it is a temporary situation, that usually he makes me feel better about the whole thing.

So now the wait is on for July. Try as I might, when the HP is done with leave, I will probably start thinking that the year is almost up. I will figure with the start of school and then Halloween and then Thanksgiving, time will blow by and I’ll turn around and it will be December. However, if I think that, I will be kidding myself. Nothing I have tried so far has made the time move faster, and even though we will have only four months to go when he goes back after leave, four months in the fall will take just as long as four months in the winter. We will have visitors, and outings, and trips, but in the end, we will still have to walk through the time, one foot in front of the other, 24 hours a day, for 120 more days. But these six months have shown me we can do it, and when we think we can’t do it, someone will be ready to come and help us out until we can.

Stop Copying Me

2006-05-24T23:35:00.000-04:00

First it was the Washington Post, now (as my sister pointed out to me) it's the AP.

Ole! Ole, Ole, Ole! Ole! Ole!

2006-05-23T22:45:00.000-04:00

When I was in second grade, I signed up to play soccer without telling my parents. I remember going home and trying to tell my mom what I had done, but since I had never heard of soccer before, I‘m sure I wasn’t particularly clear. Nevertheless, I started playing soccer and went on to play right through high school. I ended up pulling the whole family in with me – my brothers and sisters all played, my dad was a coach and later a referee, and my mom became one of the league commissioners. I considered playing in college too, but the two practices I attended convinced me that it would be a relentlessly miserable time. Maybe some day I will write about my life as a right wing, but the reason that I have been thinking about soccer these days has nothing to do with childhood nostalgia. No my friends, I am gearing up for the 2006 World Cup. Fortunately, immigration has increased the ranks of soccer fans in America sufficiently to force coverage of the whole tournament. I don’t remember seeing games at all before 1990, and I don’t think it was just because I didn’t have cable in college, but here is what I remember:

1990 World Cup - Winner: West Germany. The first world cup I remember watching took place in Italy. I was at the beach with one of my friends, and we went to a bar because her boyfriend wanted to catch some of the games. I had been such a soccer fanatic for 10 years before college, but during college, I lost track of it all together. If he hadn’t wanted to see the games, I probably never would have known they were on. As was often the case for the Americans, they lost all three of their opening round games and were eliminated from the tournament. I did get to see my first Ireland versus Italy game, the game of the great Catholic regimes, and although I was rooting for Ireland, I must have known it was a lost cause given that they were playing the home team. I don’t remember much else about the tournament, and according to Wikipedia that is because it is considered the “least spectacular and most cynical” games ever.

1994 World Cup - Winner: Brazil. When the 1994 World Cup rolled around, I was ready. My sister and I were living in Philadelphia, and I was unemployed but I was bringing in enough on unemployment to pay my rent, car payment, insurance, and bar tab. I had to add another expense to the ledger however, because the World Cup was what prompted my sister and I to finally get cable after living without it (and being regularly mocked about that fact by friends and family) for almost a year and a half. Unfortunately for my sister, she was still working, but on the days she was off we would drive to a bar somewhere, ask the bartender to put the game on (because no one had it on in those days), and nurse a few beers while we watched the game. The US team got into the tournament on a home team bid, and were completely outclassed by their opponents, although they did manage one win. My sister and I were glad when they were eliminated, because we hated having to root for a team that was so pathetic.

The highlight of the 1994 World Cup for me was the Italy versus Ireland rematch at the Meadowlands. Thousands of New Yorkers that probably couldn’t care less about soccer packed the stadium to root for the teams of their distant ancestors. A lot of the time when I see a huge crazy crowd on TV, I am just as happy to be sitting on my own couch and in my own house where the line for the bathroom is reasonably short. However, I would have loved to have been at that game. Ireland won, which I took as a personal victory in honor of my distant ancestors.

1998 World Cup - Winner: France. The HP and I will always look back on our 4th of July weekend watching the World Cup as one of our favorite weekends of all time. We were staying at my parents’ house in DC and commuting for drinking sessions with our friends (two friends of the HPs from high school and their girlfriends) in Alexandria. We would watch a game or two with my dad, and then get on the metro and ride to Alexandria to watch a game or two with our friends. We spent the whole weekend either drinking, watching TV, riding the metro, or doing any of those three things in combination. I was glad that the HP could enjoy something that I liked so much.

By the summer of the next year, the other two couples had gotten married, and we and one of the other couples had each had a child. We would look back to that care free drunken weekend and just shake our heads that things could have changed so dramatically in such a short time. In retrospect, that crazy weekend was perfectly timed. It established a point in time that we could look back to and say “That is how we used to be. That was what we did before we had kids.” It was as much fun as we ever had together, but when we compare it to our current lives as responsible (heehee) parents we never feel regret for how things have changed.

In sporting news, the US team once again failed to win or even tie a game and scored only one goal in 3 games, I believe the worst showing by a home team in World Cup history. I actually left work early one day to catch one of their games, and they were so bad, that I considered getting my work clothes back on and heading back to the office (considered, but really, I can’t think of anything that the US team could have done to make me take such an extreme action). We threw our support behind Denmark and the Netherlands because we liked to say their players’ names and because their games must have been on in our more sober moments. When France finally won by beating Brazil, I think we were happy for them, because that was back before everyone patriotic had to hate the French.

2002 World Cup – Winner: Brazil. The 2002 World Cup took place in a completely different world, and not just because 9/11 had occurred. We had gone from zero to two kids, we had gone from Maryland to Kentucky, and we had gone from enjoying the games while getting sloshed on margaritas to rising at all hours just to get a glimpse of them. The games were hosted by South Korea and Japan (who totally hate each other so I’m not sure what the organizers were thinking – probably something along the lines of, “Well they kinda look alike, let’s have them share”).

The game I remember best was the USA versus South Korea, which was televised live at about 2:00 am Kentucky time. I had gone to sleep on the couch with the TV turned on to ESPN. I figured if I subconsciously woke myself up, at least the game would be on the TV already to remind me why I was on the couch. I did wake up during the game, and what I saw on the TV was shocking to me. Like 99.99% of other Americans, I had no idea that the South Koreans were still hopping mad over Anton Ohno winning (or stealing) the gold medal over South Korea in the Salt Lake City Olympics. Like most Americans, the moment the coverage of that race concluded, I put it out of my mind and never considered it again. I’m sure my ignorance was based on the fact that I (like most Americans) had no idea what was going on in those short track speed skating events. I don’t even know when it became an event, but I’m sure it only became a televised event because NBC thought we might win a medal. Eric Heiden and Bonnie Blair and Dan Johnson never did that sort of skating, but apparently a number of famous South Korean athletes do.

As I woke up on the couch and groggily turned toward the TV, I beheld a scene that was reminiscent of some sort of frenzied political rally. It reminded me of the descriptions of the Taliban executions that took place in stadiums during their reign of terror. Every person in the stands was wearing red and was on his/her feet screaming and waving a red flag. I was quickly jolted out of my bleary-eyed state in fear that I might witness some sort of mob violence against the USA players.

Early morning awakening is one of my least favorite activities, and when it is combined with extreme mental distress, I turn into a quivering mess, complete with heart palpitations and gasping for breath. Instead of the excitement of the game, I felt anxiety toward what might happen. The game ended up as a tie, which was probably the best possible result (although my high school soccer coach informed us that tying is like kissing your sister). I was so wound up I had trouble getting back to sleep, but of course I eventually did, and when I woke up the next morning, I knew that their probably had not been any danger at that game. What I had witnessed was simply a cultural difference: South Koreans root for their country with patriotic fervor; once they have concluded their business at the concession stand, Americans root for their country with the exact amount of fervor that will allow them to avoid spilling their beer.

2006 World Cup - Winner: ???. I eagerly await the matches of 2006, which start on my daughter’s birthday and will unfortunately wind up before the HP gets home on leave in July. Of course the US team qualified in such a manner as to wind up with the most difficult draw in the tournament. I will root for them again, since I have seen some of their games leading up to the tournament and I have seen a few hopeful signs. Unfortunately, the US team (in my mind anyway) seems to have a funk about it, like they are moving in slow motion compared to the other teams. They seem so careful, so sluggish, as if the need more time than the other teams to figure out what they are going to do next. I’m sure if soccer was a bigger sport, experts from around the world would have been hired to try to find a fix for the team. After all, if we were ever shut out in the Olympics, I can guarantee that there would be Congressional hearings on the matter.

Yet Another Boring Description of My Drive to Delaware

2006-05-22T23:40:00.000-04:00

Although I have already sufficiently bored my few readers with a long and excessive description of the Chesapeake Bay Tunnel Bridge (a bridge, I might add, that desperately needs a catchier name), I still have more to say about my journeys up the coast from Virginia to Delaware. The bridge is a marvel, make no doubt about it, but just as interesting is the stretch of Virginia that starts at the southern end of Route 13 in Kiptopeke and ends in the north in New Church. Even if it was a road surrounded on all sides by grey dust, at least the exit signs advertising places like Pungoteague and Accomac are fun to read, and how can you frown when a place like Pocomoke City welcomes you to Maryland at the northern end of your ride.

The stretch of Route 13 though this part of Virginia is basically unmodernized, with good old-fashioned Americana lining both sides as far as the eye can see. Although there are a few spots where you drive past a McDonalds or Food Lion, for most of the drive, new gas stations seem to be the only update to the landscape in the past 25 years. The towns that I drive through alternate between what must have been Native American names, and what the settlers must have decided were appropriate European names. For every Washapreague there is a Cape Charles, for every Nassawadox there is a Temperanceville. I know that these sorts of names can be found all around the country, but on Route 13 the names seem to originate from colonial times, either Native American or British, nothing modern or exotic in between.

While the town markers are interesting, I find the buildings and businesses along the way to be even more intriguing. I pass a broad range of living quarters, churches, restaurants and other businesses, some of which are unchanged by time, and many of which are begging for a change.

When I was working for a company that did environmental assessments of property in preparation for sale (due diligence as they say) I would often be sent to vacant fields or corn fields that would seem to be straightforward cases. It seemed that if I noted the acreage and what was around it, the survey would be pretty much done, except it never was. Usually, when doing a quick inspection of a bunch of trees that seemed rather out of place in the middle of a field, I would find the remains of a house or a barn. For one reason or another, the building had been abandoned and over time the landscape had surrounded it, hugged it and finally consumed it. I always wondered how a building that had once housed a family had been allowed to be swallowed up by the ground it was built on. However, when you drive down Route 13, you can see the process in action.

Most of the houses along Route 13 are old, dating to an era when kelly green asbestos shingles were considered a good idea. Few of the houses have been updated or improved, and while many are well tended, most seem to be getting tired. Some of the houses are completely surrounded by their landscaping. Bushes and trees that might have been decorative when they were planted are now dominating the lot, leaning up against the house and perhaps pushing ever so gently against the walls. I often try to determine (while paying close attention to the road and traveling at the posted speed limit) whether these houses are still occupied, and I often wonder which is worse – to leave your house when the greenery starts to take over, or to continue to live there when you are too old, or too tired, or too poor, or too drug-addled to take some landscaping equipment and reclaim an area for your house.

Besides the homes, there is another grouping of abodes that always catches my eye: the homes for immigrant workers who man the farm fields and chicken processing plants along the way. The buildings look like teeny motels, with a row of windows along the back and a row of doors along the front, where hopefully single men and women spend small amounts of time sleeping between shifts. I hope they are single and sleeping, because to think that a small family is occupying one of those cells, or that someone is spending a great deal of time in one is rather depressing. Once daylight savings time ended and I had a chance to see these buildings up close in the light, I noticed that some of them have Direct TV satellite dishes attached to poles outside the back doors. Maybe in my mind I am over dramatizing the plight of the inhabitants. Maybe these buildings are full of single people who view them as hotel rooms – places to stay while they save money to bring their families to this country or go back to their own and live comfortably. I like to think that when they each workers has save enough, he or she moves on to a better job and a better home and leaves the little room to the next hopeful.

There are two chicken processing plants along Route 13, one in Temperanceville and one in Accomac, and two tomato processing plants. However, I never see much action outside these plants, which I’m sure are manned around the clock. Probably people who are dependent on jobs in these plants (dependent in a way that I have never been) don’t ever think of arriving late or leaving early or lingering outside to smoke a cigarette. I have read stories about chicken chasers and chicken pluckers and other chicken factory workers in the Washington Post. In Delaware, many of the people who work in chicken plants are from Guatemala, and apparently these are examples of jobs that Americans do not want to do, and jobs for which companies recruit immigrants. Between what I imagine to be the harshness of their jobs and the bleakness of their homes, I wonder if they really feel like they have found a piece of the American dream.

If I tire of pondering the immigration dilemma, Route 13 has its share of small local restaurants, some obviously seasonal, some with signs all in Spanish, and some obviously old time local favorites. The most interesting spots though are the “seafood shacks” which are literally seafood shacks. Each has hand-lettered plywood signs advertising fresh crabs, shrimp, and other creatures taken daily from the bay or the ocean. I often try to peer into these shacks to see if someone really is selling seafood, or if the shack has been abandoned and no one had the energy to take down all the signs. More often than not, the seafood shack is in business. One evening as I was driving past one of these establishments, I noticed a man standing at the side of the road who looked like he was hitchhiking. As I got closer I noticed that although he had the hitchhiker stance – shoulder to the road, arm in the air- he was not facing the oncoming traffic. I am not an experienced hitchhiker, but from what I’ve seen on TV, facing the oncoming traffic is an important part of the posture. When I got closer I realized that he was not hitchhiking, he was holding up a shrimp, attempting to draw customers in by showing them the fine product he was selling. I never took marketing in college, but considering how long it took me to figure out what the guy was doing and how far down the road I had traveled before I realized what he had been holding, I think he should consider investing in a big stuffed animal shrimp and holding that up by the side of the road.

The buildings and businesses are not the only attractions to ponder on the trip. In the summertime, I realized that the sides of the roads are lined by crape myrtles and in more than one spot I pass a crape myrtle farm. Some of the fields look cultivated, and some of them look like they have never had a use. I find it strange to come from an area of nonstop development (while on my way to an area of nonstop development) to an area where fields sit overgrown and unused, without a “for sale” sign or zoning notice anywhere.

I am sure that if I turned off Route 13 in either direction at any of the major intersections, I would probably find quaint summer villages and thriving seaside communities - big homes along the water and summer cottages along the bay. However, as with the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, I am always forging ahead, attempting to reach my destination before the natives in the backseat get restless and start complaining about their accommodations. But someday when the HP returns and we are making our way north in a more leisurely fashion, maybe we will stop to see what is happening down the road in Cape Charles or Kiptopeke. We’ll stop and enjoy a meal from the “Healthy Lunch Menu” at the Great Machipongo Clam Shack in Nassawadox. And we’ll get to meet one or two of the people who live in the houses or work in the establishments along sleepy Route 13.

The Kids Are In Love, with The Sound of Music

2006-05-21T23:33:00.000-04:00

I know you are supposed to try to expose your children to the arts. If I were a better parent I would take them to museums (and not just the kind where you play with all the stuff). I’d track down a performance of Peter and the Wolf or the concert of some children’s musician. I’d read them classic fairy tales and poetry. But sometimes all that stuff seems like a lot of work and a lot of stress for very little payoff. If you arrive at a concert hall only to discover that your kiddie cannot stand the noise of an orchestra, then you have not only thrown away your ticket money, but also annoyed countless people all in a misguided attempt to introduce him to culture that he probably couldn’t care less about yet. Is it like vegetables, where if you keep pushing it on them they will eventually start to like it? Or is it like touching the stove, where the burn keeps them from ever going near it again?

Now that our three are a bit older and wiser, I decided that maybe we would venture out into the art world and see what happened. Today the kiddies and I attended an on post performance of The Sound of Music. The “on post” part was attractive to me because it meant the tickets would not be too expensive. The proximity of the theater to our house was also important because none of the kids could fall asleep in the 3 minutes it took to drive there.

I had been debating about whether or not to take them from the time I saw the announcement in the local paper. I knew that the girls would love the show, that they would be well-behaved, and that it would likely hold their attention because there were actual children playing the children. What I was not so sure of was how Marty would take the whole experience, and more importantly, what caliber of performer lurks in the on post play house. I also didn’t know how the kiddies would react to the whole fleeing Austria part of the play since as far as they know, the movie ends with Maria and the Captain getting married. I have kept them in the dark partly because I shelter them and partly because the movie is so stinking long just to get to the wedding, I feel it is a good breaking point.

However, since we didn’t have anyone lined up to visit this weekend and since yesterday I exhausted the time consuming running errands and gardening portions of the weekend, I figured I’d better line something up for this afternoon or the kids and I would likely find ourselves at odds. Learning from my past mistakes, I did some extremely careful planning. First, I didn’t tell the kids where we were going until 30 minutes before we were leaving. Second, I didn’t put Marty down for a nap, because I figured if he was tired enough, he could sleep through the first act of the play. After all, he slept through a good deal of the circus a few months ago. Third, I remembered to have the girls go to the bathroom seconds before we left so that they would not have to leave our seats during the show.

Everything on our end went rather smoothly, and we ended up with seats on the aisle, so I knew we could make a hasty exit if we needed to. Unfortunately, the man who took my ticket reservation gave me bad advice and said the theater was going to be so packed I should get there 45 minutes before showtime. Clearly that was not going to happen, but we did get there 25 minutes early, and then the show started at least 15 minutes late. Every time I thought things were about to get underway, another little old lady would shuffle off to the bathroom, and the curtain would be held for another few minutes. The girls were treated to 40 minutes of all the kids around them eating popcorn. I promised them we could get some at halftime (they have seen a lot of sporting events and not so many plays – they weren’t familiar with the word intermission) in another bid to secure their good behavior. Since the room was dim and noisy, Marty immediately went into a defensive slouch and fell asleep on my lap (and turned into a human fireball) 20 minutes before the show started.

But once the show started, everything was great. The performers were shockingly good, professional quality singers (I later had a chance to look at the program and a bunch of the performers were from the nearby Governor’s School for the Arts). Although the play is really long and the theater was sweltering, the girls soldiered through the first act without any complaining or major fidgeting. Marty woke up with about 15 minutes to go in the first act, but he didn’t cry or get noisy. (For a report on intermission, click here). They were much less enthused at the start of the second act, since most of their favorite songs had been sung in the first act, but they eventually got caught up in the action again, probably because most of what goes on in the second act is the stuff from the movie that they’ve never seen.

I have seen many musicals in my life, but most of them were in the theater of my brothers’ high school. When I was in grade school, my aunt took us to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at Ford’s Theater in Washington (which was a bonus because we got to go across the street into the house where they took Lincoln after he was shot). I’m pretty sure the next professional production I saw was Phantom of the Opera in Philadelphia after I was married. While we were in Kentucky, the HP and I saw a few shows in Louisville, one of which was a retrospective of Frank Sinatra songs. I think all the rest were straight plays.

As I look back on that short list of musicals, I feel a little sad, because I love musicals. I love show tunes. Why don’t I go out and see musicals more often? Oh yeah, I have kids now. The HP and I choose our entertainment based on the calendar, not based on what we would really like to see or do. If a babysitter is available, we see what’s playing and pick from those options rather than buying tickets for something we’d love to see and then trying in vain to pin down a babysitter. This sad situation is the reason we saw Road to Perdition in a movie theater even though it violated ever criteria I have for paying to see a movie (including it has to have at least a few lighthearted moments and it has to have a happy ending).

But we should make more of an effort to get to the theater and see plays with the kids and without them. I know lots of people that go to New York to see a show every year, but that never really appealed to me (I love New York as much as the next girl, but I don’t want to go there on a bus). But now that I’ve seen that even a small theater in Virginia can put on a musical with talented singers and musicians (who are working for free) maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the thought of attending a musical in other local venues. Maybe I should check the schedule of that Governor’s High School - I bet they put on musicals too. Even with the human radiator on my lap this afternoon and two other kiddies to keep an eye on, I was still at times transported out of the everyday and into somebody else’s world. I could do with a little transporting now and then, especially after spending so much time worrying about the current events in my world.

The Sound of Music did some time as the girls’ favorite movie, and in fact in inspired Lauren to carry around and talk to an imaginary set of seven children for almost a year. She was always giving us updates on Gretl’s bad behavior, and how the Captain was 100 years old, and how Liesl always eats brownies for breakfast because that’s what Maria told her to do. She hardly ever mentions the seven children anymore, which makes me a little sad to think she is growing up so quickly. However, at one point during the show, Lauren put her hand on my arm and whispered, “Mommy, I was so busy watching the show, I forgot that Aislinn was with us.” I’m sure for a moment she had forgotten that anyone was with her, because she was transported to Austria, and she was marching and singing with the Von Trapp family.

I Can't Believe It Myself, A Defense of Britney Spears

2006-05-19T22:34:00.000-04:00

Leave Britney Spears Alone. These are four words I never thought I’d say, not because I have any dislike of Britney Spears, but because I have absolutely no opinion of Britney Spears. I don’t particularly like her music, I’m not inspired by her fashion sense, and I can’t see any reason why she is always in the news. Nevertheless, when I sat down at my computer today and saw the headline “Britney Nearly Drops Baby in Front of Paparazzi,” I must admit that I clicked on it to take a look, to see if she had gone the way of Michael Jackson and dangled the poor little guy out the window. It turns out she was leaving a hotel, when she NOT ONLY STUMBLED, but also BENT LOW and KNOCKED THE BABY’S HAT OFF (yes, the baby’s hat, not the baby’s head). Other important details of this incident: she was carrying a GLASS and her pants were TOO LONG. Apparently she has also let him fall out of the high chair and misused his car seat.

If, after her short reign as a mother, that is the best the press can come up with, she is doing pretty well. I stumble carrying my kids all the time and I’ve never been a headline on Yahoo news. If the paparazzi decided to follow me around, they could have come up with the following headlines just today:

“First Grader Heads to Bus Stop Alone and Reeking of Alcohol! After School, Dejectedly Walks Home From Bus Stop Alone!”

“Feebleminded Mother Forgets Pre-School End of Year Picnic; Arrives Late and Touches Hot Dog Roll with Hand!” and

“Distracted Mother Rushes Bleeding Toddler Inside After Trampoline Accident!”

Yes, today was a banner morning. Fifteen seconds before the bus came, Aislinn was rooting around in a low cabinet in the kitchen for reasons that have still not been explained to me since she had eaten breakfast and her lunch was made. She somehow knocked over and broke a 1.5 liter bottle of wine that was sitting on the floor in a designated beverage holding area near the washing machine (That is the truly puzzling part, since it was sitting on the floor, all it did was tip over, and yet the bottom smashed, leading me to believe that the Australians may be cutting corners when it comes to the glass they are using in their wine bottles). Since Lauren and Marty were up and around, I couldn’t leave the mess in the kitchen to take her to the bus stop without risking one of them coming in to the kitchen. In the best case scenario they would come in to see what had happened and end up with their feet covered in wine. In the worst case scenario they would try to be helpful and clean it up, leading of course to cuts, lacerations, and puddles of blood. So I helped Aislinn on with her back pack, wished her luck on her spelling test, and sent her down the block to the bus stop.

Once I got the wine cleaned up and the other two dressed and out the door, Lauren informed me “Today is the big part-day preschool picnic!” I had seen exactly one notice about the picnic posted in the room, but since I am usually chasing Marty around while I’m there, I’d never had a chance to note the date. I foolishly assumed that the end of preschool picnic would take place near the end of preschool. One of Lauren’s teachers told me “No, that’s why I’ve been saying everyday ‘Don’t forget the end of school picnic on the 26th! Don’t forget the 26th!’” To which I replied “Today is not the 26th.” Then she said “Oh, you’re right, I must be thinking about something else that’s going on that day.” So, I took a moment to determine whether I was going to be the mean mommy who didn’t show up, or if I was going to dump my plans for my precious free time and put in an appearance at the picnic. Of course I went.

At the picnic I was helping to get the plates ready for the kids, and I began putting hot dog buns on plates with my clean but uncovered hands. For some reason, the food service gloves were at the playground, but they rushed a pair over to me so that I would not infect the kiddies (who had just come from a public restroom to sit down outdoors at public picnic tables). (Note: In my own defense, I have been through a lot of health and safety training at previous jobs, and I have never observed untrained people using food service gloves properly. Today was no exception.)

After school Lauren and Marty wanted to go on the trampoline, so I took my book and a chair and sat in the sun while they jumped around. While I was absorbed in the tale of Robert Moses building the Triborough Bridge in New York, Marty knocked his face into the back of Lauren’s head. When I heard the crying and looked up, Lauren was frantically trying to quiet him so that we would not have to leave the trampoline, but he was bleeding so we all went inside. In the hullabaloo, I missed the school bus going by the house and the next thing I knew, Aislinn was coming through the door (and actually, she wasn't looking dejected because she felt very mature walking down the block by herself).

And there you have it. If I was famous, people would be calling child protective services and removing children from my home. Since I am not famous, people seem to understand that this was just a typical day in the life of a typical mom. And that’s just today. Here are some other headlines from my past six years:

“Mother Tosses Baby into Kitchen Light Fixture at Family Gathering!!”

“Mother Completes Clean Sweep as She Inadvertently Pushes Third and Final Child Off a Swing!!!”

“Thuds and Crying Emanate from Local House Where Parents Refuse to Stop Leaving Babies Unattended on Furniture!!”

“Attempting to Get Child’s Attention, Mother Takes Daughter Out at the Ankles!!”

“Trouble in Paradise? Mother Takes Off Engagement Ring, Claims It is Gouging the Babies!!”

“Negligent Mother Let’s Child Jump into Pool and Slip Through Her Hands!!!”

“Is It a Cry For Help? Inattentive Mother Slams Explorer Tailgate on Her Own Head!

I could go on and on (that is, I could if I hadn’t hit my head so hard with the tailgate). If you’ve got short people in the house, particularly the type who are determined to get around and explore, chances are they are going to get hurt and chances are, some of the time, it is going to be your fault. What can you do? Hover? I read recently in Newsweek that hovering is bad, but besides the psychological damage it can do to your kid, it’s really boring.

There are four kinds of people who can claim that they have never made a mistake as a parent: liars; people without children; senile people; and amnesiacs. However, being a member of any of those groups disqualifies you from harshly judging people who are parents. For everyone who is not a member of those groups, if you have a kid, you have made mistakes, big and small on a daily basis, so all this mommy-sniping should stop. I admit I like the superior feeling I get when parents in the neighborhood say completely ridiculous things to their children, or tolerate bad behavior from them. But then I have to remind myself that very few people raise serial killers or other serious criminals, so although parents might inadvertently be encouraging their kids to be annoying in the short term, chances are that overall they are doing enough to turn them into functioning citizens.

So here is what I think about poor Britney: at least she seems to want to spend time with her son. If she left the baby at home, the headlines would scream “Pregnant Britney Out on the Town, What About the Baby??!!!” or “Moving On?? Britney Leaves Son at Home to Focus on Second Baby!!!” Since she takes him everywhere, like every other mother in the world, people want to find something wrong with that. Since she is not sufficiently brooding and aloof for a celebrity, the paparazzi must think she is someone they can topple. Since she is too cheerful and too friendly, people think she is just like them but with more money, so they want to see her brought down and put in her place.

I feel bad for her, and if she doesn’t want to hole up in a compound somewhere, why should she? I have three suggestions for her. First, for goodness sakes, with the money you are making, get yourself a driver and have one of those professional car seat installers come out and put a seat in every car for you. If I won the lottery, the first thing I would do is turn in my driver’s license and let somebody else cart me around. Second, get your son one of those hats with a chin strap so it won’t fall off when you stumble in front of the paparazzi. Finally, stop recording songs with names like “Oops I Did It Again” and “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” That just makes the tabloid writers’ jobs too easy.

Punctuator's Anonymous

2006-05-17T22:40:00.000-04:00

Hi, my name is Shannon, and I’m addicted to parentheses. Not just parentheses, commas too, and the dash, - how I love the initial and final dash - to set off ideas in my sentences. I know I once knew this stuff. I know what comes at the end of a question or a "declarative" sentence. But I am lost in a sea of punctuation when I try to quote a question inside parentheses at the end of a sentence. An example would be:(I wonder to myself, “Why am I addicted to parentheses?”). There are times when I am writing up an essay that I stop to consider how many punctuation marks a person can put in a row and still be within the limits of grammatically correct. I believe my personal record is five, with a word in quotes inside a quote ending in a question mark, followed by a parenthesis, and period : ‘”?). (Hey look! That sentence had six!) I have the spell/grammar check turned on - Microsoft Word is welcome to put its wavy green line under these creations and mark them as mistakes, but typically it never does. My personal opinion on Word’s lack of interest in punctuation is that it wants to encourage people to use symbols rather than swear words, in sentences such as “I can’t believe this #$%^ idiot uses so many *&%#^ punctuation marks when she writes these ?:<”$# lame pieces of <>:”$#@!!!”

I know I learned a lot about grammar growing up, since I went to good schools. In fact, I know that it is very bad to use the word “very” since it weakens the thought, and yet I do it very often. I know that you should not end a sentence with a preposition, but sometimes I don’t know what else to end it with. I can identify a run-on sentence with the best of them – in fact I can remember sitting in Mrs. Devine’s seventh grade English class and picking out run-on sentences from countless worksheets and textbooks, particularly in the lessons where you are supposed to identify fragments also. Oh, fragments - bad. I know you are supposed to use “one” instead of “you” when referring to a person other than myself, but you know how it goes.

If there was one activity in 8th grade that I led the pack in, it was diagramming sentences. I could assign a name, purpose, and place on the diagram to every word in every sentence that came my way. What I was never so hot at, was taking the words off the diagram and figuring out how to put them in a sentence with proper punctuation. Now that I have chosen the run-on sentence as a style, the rules of punctuation should be more important to me, I should be making more of an effort to indicate where one thought ends and the next begins, I should utilize that red-headed stepchild of punctuation, the semi-colon, so that people would understand what is going on in these seemingly endless sentences.

I remember sophomore year in high school Sister Michaela made us answer essay questions about American authors in the style of the author. Maybe answering the Ernest Hemingway essay question caused me to suffer a chemical imbalance which led me to adopt (or should I say bastardize) his long, long sentence structure. Story-wise, I definitely preferred the John Steinbeck novels that we read, but apparently his style didn’t rub off on me at all. So maybe substance is more important than style, and if you are saying something interesting, people will listen whether your sentences are long and convoluted or short and choppy. When I write I imagine that I am saying things out loud, and I don’t seem to be a very good storyteller – I can rarely hold anyone’s attention long enough to get to the end of my story. With this in mind, I probably just write like I would speak - I have so much to add to a topic, and so much fear that no one is going to stop and listen to the whole of what I have to say, that I string it all together in one long sentence in hopes I get it all out before my audience wanders away.

I wish I had taken more classes on writing in college, but as a chemistry major, few of the electives I was offered involved the finer points of essay writing. I’m sure I summarized some technical articles, and I know I wrote laboratory reports, but in technical writing, all aspects of style are sacrificed in the name of simplicity and organization. No one really cares to compliment your sentence structure, particularly if it becomes so complicated that the central idea is hard to follow. I know some people might argue that non-technical essays are also hard to read if your sentence structure is complicated, but I for one, don’t really mind rereading a complicated sentence if the pay off is especially clever (and I’m not claiming that this is ever the case with me).

With all apologies to the English, History, and Philosophy departments, the college class that taught me the most about writing was Mr. Toolin’s first-year physics lab. Mr. Toolin gave every student six lines on the front of each laboratory report for the abstract. We were told that these six lines must include the purpose of the experiment, the procedure, and the conclusions. The abstract was something like 25% of the grade for each experiment, since he wanted us to learn that if you couldn’t explain what you had done, why you had done it, and what you found out, no one would go past the abstract; no one would bother looking inside to see the data, and thus there was no sense in doing the experiment in the first place. I had to rewrite abstracts over and over again to get them to the proper length while retaining the proper information. I think the stringent requirements of Mr. Toolin’s abstract writing are the source of all the praise my writing I received in the working world. I know how to identify and toss out every extraneous word thanks to the unrelenting tutelage of Mr. Toolin. But here I have no such need, no one will really care if I stick in extra words (and punctuation marks). Some people might actually enjoy it.

But to think some people might enjoy it is to let myself off the hook. I should learn a way to express myself without endless asides and parentheses and commas and dashes, but I only have time to do one thing at a time, and right now what I am doing is getting into the habit of writing. Once I have a firmly established habit, maybe then I will clean up my act and get into the habit of writing nicely. Until then I guess any readers I find will have to muddle through with me and try to find their way around these sentences. Hey, it’s season finale week on TV, what else is there to do this summer?

Pomp and Circumstance

2006-05-16T22:28:00.000-04:00

This weekend marked the beginning of college commencements and the premiere of one of my favorite shows on C-Span. Okay, I don’t really have an extensive list of shows on C-Span that I love, but the compilation of commencement speeches by famous politicians, writers, and others (sometimes actors, sometimes scientists) is a once-yearly program that I thoroughly enjoy. The three times that I was pregnant during the spring and unable to sleep through the night, I would sometimes lie on the couch and flip through all of the channels desperate for something to watch, something that would distract me from worrying whether baby #1 (or 2) would feel disenfranchised by the arrival of baby #2 (or 3). In a public service that I feel has not previously been properly acknowledged, C-Span collects video of commencement addresses and runs them for an hour or two during its off hours.

Back in the day (well okay, 3 years ago), I used these speeches to calm my fears for my children. Sometimes when I interact with other parents enough, and read Newsweek enough, I feel like no one is looking out for my kids but me (and of course the HP and our immediate families). I feel encouraged to hear that people in government or the arts still appreciate the kids coming up behind them and look forward to viewing their contribution to the future. Each of these speakers is agreeing to spend some time motivating and supporting graduates, not because of family loyalty or hope of financial gain, but because she doesn’t think wishing graduates well will somehow lessen her ability to be successful. That is an attitude that borders on the un-American these days.

No matter how old I am and how far removed from college I am, a college commencement speech is always inspirational to me. Perhaps there are other rapidly aging mothers out there who listen as I do, as someone who has long since graduated and yet has still not found a career that I want for a career. I use the encouragement and the perspectives that successful people offer graduates to try to push myself to consider the future differently, to think about what’s possible, to try to believe that I am the one who can take my future and make it what I want. Listening to the advice, the warnings, the suggestions from people who have achieved greatness (or some measure of it) in this country always transports me back to my college graduation (more on this later). I can imagine the seniors sitting in the audience, some of them hung over and having been up all night, who don’t yet quite realize the change that is about to come.

So can you picture me there, dressed in my cap and gown, soaking in the wisdom of my commencement speaker? Neither can I. First of all, my commencement cap and gown ensemble was clearly intended for someone who was 6 feet 4 inches rather than 5 feet 4 inches. It completely enveloped me and dragged across the grass so that I was in constant fear of tripping over it. Fortunately, I was not in fear that my hat would fall off because: 1) I have a huge head; and 2) my friend LT loaned me one of her three bobby pins to secure my hat. The securing of my hat is a memorable moment, because as I was complaining to a four-year acquaintance of mine (who I won’t single out here except to say that her name was Christine) that I had no way to make sure my hat didn’t fall off, she looked at me and said “Oh, that’s stinks.” When I looked up at her, I noticed that her hat was completely encircled by bobby pins. That’s how you know who your friends are, not to get all biblical or anything, but your friends will give to you from what little they have, and the other people will shrug as your hat falls off your head on graduation day.

We had arrived at the staging area on graduation day after a rather severe night of partying. As I imagine is the case for many people, a few of my close friends and I found ourselves at Denny’s eating breakfast with some people we barely knew. Suddenly we were all close, because we were all undergoing the same huge upheaval on the same day. We all agreed that we would go home, shower, get dressed and meet back at my apartment for champagne before the ceremony. I don’t remember how many of the group made it there, but I do remember my friend Doreen and I calling each other repeatedly to make sure that we didn’t fall asleep and miss graduation. When we were both dressed, she came down to my apartment and we lay down on my bed to wait for the guests, and probably would have slept there all day if we hadn’t had 5 other housemates looking after us. Eventually we all set out into the blazing sun to make the trek to the stadium and graduation. The sun was an absolutely unfair development, because all of Cape Week and Senior Week had been freezing cold, and now that we could all use a bracing stiff breeze, instead we got a hangover-inducing beatdown courtesy of the sun. We had walked to the end of our street when we realized we had forgotten the roses that Doreen’s mom had sent for us to carry as we processed in, so we all turned around and went back for them, a straggle that drained the last bit of energy we had left.

I remember lining up and marching into the stadium. When I looked behind me, the crowd was a sea of waving relatives who didn’t realize that everyone else was looking and waving at someone else. I remember being sort of proud to have a Chemistry sash instead of a liberal arts one (although the color was awful), and I remember the sun beating down. I remember I felt sort of bad because I knew that if my mom managed to pick me out in the expanse of graduates, she would likely spend much of the ceremony worrying about the sunburn that was rapidly spreading across the back of my neck. Who was the commencement speaker? I’m not entirely sure. I think he was a Jesuit named Father Healy who was the president (or former president) of Georgetown University. All I know is that he was brain-numbingly (no, that’s the wrong word, I would have done anything for brain-numbing at that point) fingernail-yanking, torturously boring. Bear in mind that this is my memory of his speech, if I saw it replayed on C-Span this weekend, it might have brought a tear to my eye. Our valedictorian was a guy named Mo (really, his name was Maurice) who was somewhat engaging, but nowhere near as entertaining as we’d all expected him to be (I guess we weren’t really considering that he had to write a speech to please the administration, graduates, and thousands of family members in attendance).

I remember showing my namecard to the lady who was making sure we were all in alphabetical order, and then navigating the stairs very carefully since I was hungover/slightly drunk, dabbling in heat exhaustion, and wearing a gown for someone a full foot taller than me. I heard my name, and I remember shaking hands with the president of the college since it was the first and only occasion I ever came in contact with him. I remember feeling happy when I heard my friends and family cheer for me, and then I remember just sitting in my seat and crying, waiting for the ceremony to end. I was overwhelmed by everything that had happened, the exhaustion, the sunburn, and the friends who had gotten me through the four years and across the stage with my hat on my head.

The rest of the day is a blur. My parents and my sister and I all went out to lunch with one of my aunts and my grandmother. My parents dropped me back at my apartment to pack up, and I was alone because my roommate had gone home with her parents and was coming back later to get all of her stuff. I didn’t even want to pack my stuff, I wanted to leave it and get on with something new (of course being a rather frugal, sensible girl, I would never have been so romantic as to make such a dramatic break with my sheets and towels). Doreen and I talked about going to a party down the street, but all I wanted was to go to bed and get clear of that house. I couldn’t let the long goodbye go on any longer. I wanted to be back in Washington where I could clear my head and somehow make sense of everything that had happened in those last few weeks of college. In a final act of irresponsibility, I never turned in my enormous cap and gown; I left it hanging in the window of my apartment. I imagine one of my friends or roommates must have turned it in (as far as I know my parents were never billed for it), but I didn't have the strength to go back on campus and see anyone else.

Of course, once I was well into the summer, I couldn’t wait to get back to my friends and carry on the way we had in school. I was worried about getting a job, traveling, getting into graduate school, finding a boyfriend, finding a party, all kinds of things that a commencement speaker glosses over as he offers advice on what should come next. If I had been listening, I would have known that I should have been spending that time deciding what I was going to do with my life, how I would make a difference, how I could be a “Person for Others” in the grand Jesuit tradition. Well, though college is a rather distant memory, I find myself finally ready to listen and to take the advice of people who are smarter and more lucid than I am. It’s time to decide what else I’m going to do with my life. And so I shall. For right now, I’m going to turn on C-Span.

So Much for Being Nice, Here's Another Rant - Take This Crap Off The Air

2006-05-15T23:12:00.000-04:00

When some of my friends and family started to read this blog, they asked me “When do you find time to do all this writing?” I have one answer: every evening from 8 to 11 pm (with the exception of Wednesdays) because there is absolutely nothing on TV the rest of the time. Of the 4200 hours or so of prime time TV available on my cable system every week, I watch the following shows regularly: The Amazing Race, Lost, What Not To Wear, and The Sopranos. I have watched other shows from time to time, but invariably they disappoint me with idiocy (jump the shark as they say). I can’t watch CSI and other coroner shows because they are too gross, and I can’t watch some other shows because it is too hard to figure out when they are on. I usually jump from channel to channel checking out the food network or a sitcom, and then clicking away at the start of each commercial. I wish I had some stuff to watch on TV, I like lying on the couch as much as the next girl, but things just haven’t worked out for me.

I must confess that there was a time last spring and early last fall when I though Grey’s Anatomy was a pretty good show. Unfortunately, like all pretty good shows, they only had enough plot for about 5 or 6 episodes. After that they obviously locked their writers in a room, starved them, deprived them of sleep, fed in some funny gas through the vents of the HVAC and had a few monkeys record the plots they came up with. I suppose it is possible that two people impaled by the same pole could be brought into the ER and make witty banter for an hour before one of them kicks off. I guess it’s possible that a doctor who performs open heart surgery in an elevator would gain absolutely no confidence and become a sniveling idiot with the start of each new episode (a doctor with the worst haircut since Buckwheat who then goes on to get an even worse haircut a la Alfalfa). I’m sure there are hospitals out there where almost all of the action takes place in an elevator that can only travel one floor per minute because it is operated by a small gnome frantically pedaling a tiny bicycle. But once you’ve used up all these great ideas, what else could possibly happen?

Okay, maybe a crazy war reenactor could end up with an unexploded rocket lodged in his chest. Maybe it could have been held in place inside his chest by a paramedic for hours, while being lifted onto a stretcher, through an ambulance ride, the hallways of the hospital, the elevator, and more hallways. Maybe when the scared paramedic took her hand away, a doctor could have instantaneously stuck her hand into the guy and stabilized the rocket. Maybe a cute, understanding, explosives expert would have let three doctors stay in the room with the patient who could explode at any time. Maybe when the doctor moved her hand and pulled out the rocket, nothing would have happened. Maybe if you suspend all belief, these things could have transpired. Where I must draw the line however, is that the cute explosives expert (wearing no protective gear) would have the rocket pulled out and put onto a tray which he would then carry down the hallway to a waiting disposal box, all the while chatting with yet another explosives expert (wearing no protective gear) as if he is carrying a tray full of macaroni from the cafeteria. Is there an explosives expert anywhere, cute or ugly, that would not have had the explosion proof container 6 inches from the patient? At the very moment where we are all supposed to feel sad and surprised that cute explosives expert has been vaporized, I was rolling my eyes in disbelief that they would top off the world’s most unlikely scenario with somehow an even more unlikely scenario.

I mean, at the time that was the world’s most unlikely scenario – little did I know what was coming up next. The “two-part season finale” has made the exploding rocket episode look like a documentary. I have not watched this show very closely lately, but it appears that one doctor (Dizzy) has fallen in love with a patient who needs a new heart. He is some sort of construction worker, who apparently works for a company that provides unlimited insurance benefits, allowing him to live in a private room at a private hospital for months without the need for a single conversation regarding who is paying the bills. He has had many close calls, almost dying, but then finally, miraculously, a heart donor is found. Actually, two heart donors (brothers) that were in the same car accident (and both died of injuries that spared all their organs) are found and are about to have their organs harvested simultaneously when the guy designated to donate Dizzy’s boyfriend’s heart dies and becomes unable to donate. Since the donors were brothers, the other brain dead (but not totally dead) brother would also be a donor match for Dizzy’s boyfriend, but since the person who was supposed to get the heart from the second brother got onto the transplant list 17 seconds before Dizzy’s boyfriend, he has dibs. So what do you think happened next?

Of course Dizzy, holes up in her boyfriend’s hospital room, and although he is on all sorts of monitors and drugs, no nurse ever stops by to see what’s going on. Then Dizzy, outraged by the 17 second rule and driven to insanity by her love for a guy she has played Scrabble with several times, decides to cut the wires to her boyfriends external heart pump, essentially killing him, so that he will be sicker and he will win the second heart. Even if you believe all the parts of this scenario of the doctor gone crazy for love, tell me if you can believe the rest of this: By phone, Dizzy tells the doctor in charge of the transplant what she is planning to do. Does he send a nurse, a security guard, another doctor, a maintenance man, in to stop her? No, he decides to drive back across town to check on the situation himself. Dizzy has one of her fellow interns come into the room and tells him what she is planning to do. Does he wrestle the scissors out of her hand? Call for help? Run so he will not be a part of the crazy scheme? No, he stands there wringing his hands and looking perplexed about what’s going on and unable to think of a way to stop it. So as the meaningful song plays in the background and the camera shots jump from scene to scene throughout the hospital, Dizzy cuts the wires and the show ends.

Unfortunately, while the camera is jumping from scene to scene, we get to see that the transplant doctor has been shot right outside the hospital (by a known teenage assailant who shot up a fast food restaurant and then eluded police all afternoon until he found his way to the hospital where all of his victims were being treated – clearly no police would have been waiting for him there). Is he shot in the leg so that he can limp into the second part and do surgery while he bleeds? No. Is he shot in the head so he can die and throw Dizzy’s plans into a tizzy? No. Come on now, put on your soap opera hats. He gets shot in the shoulder with just the slightest nick to his nerves so that one of his hands (Gasp! He’s a surgeon!) is paralyzed and he needs emergency neurosurgery. Meanwhile, hours later, the chief resident finally locates every other doctor in the show in the room with the rapidly dying boyfriend and gives them a talking to.

What happens next? I’m sure you know that the Dizzy is fired for what she’s done. Ha! Of course not! The interns all band together and reprise that famous scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers where they all take blame (credit) for the wirecutting (baby) so that all of them will keep their jobs (keep from being strung up by angry fathers). So what does the chief of the hospital do when he is confronted with this defiance from interns that have been working for him for less than a year? Suspend them all? Cut off their funding? Stop it silly! Of course he makes them throw a prom in the hospital for his niece who was brought in earlier that day (from her prom, I’m not sure why she needs another one, unless it is to complete sleeping with her boyfriend because apparently she passed out doing that at the first prom) because she has cancer.

I don’t know how this show will end because it is on right now and I can’t take one more second of it. I’m sure the heart transplant guy will probably die and the surgeon will get his fingers back. Everyone will break up and get back together and cast knowing glances at each other since everyone loves the people that belong to every one else. This little synopsis barely scratches the surface of the stupidity of what I saw in one and a half parts of the two part episode (I can't even face detailing the fast food plot). I find myself rather queasy at the fact that I have wasted 1500 words on it, but something must be done. Please, please take this show off the air.

Oh, They Say That In The Army, The Housing's Mighty Fine

2006-05-12T18:53:00.000-04:00

I realize that rants are a lot easier to write (and can be much more entertaining to read) than happy, appreciative posts, but the more tirades I read in the paper and online, the more I feel I need to add one to the other side, to help balance the scales. And so, as I was driving back on post this morning and the gate guard told me to “Have a Happy Mother’s Day,” I thought, “This is a pretty nice place to live.” Now I will tell you all why.

The Gate Guards. Without fail the gate guards here and in Kentucky have been friendly and polite every time I have come through and shown my ID. They say nice things and wave to the kiddies, and on one occasion even began to sing along with them. For the most part they take their jobs very seriously, and always check to make sure I resemble my ID and that neither the ID nor the DOD stickers on the car are expired. Although there was one time when it seemed like Osama himself could have driven up with an ID that said “Skippy O’Connell” and been waved through with a “Have a nice day!” every other time I have felt like the guards are paying very close attention. If you don’t have a DOD sticker, you have to park and take your registration and insurance card in to the guard building for a temporary pass to drive on post, and then pull into a shelter to have your car inspected. That, my friends, is a gated community.

The Yards. While I have covered the yards and attendant yard work on post ad nauseum, over and over , in a redundant fashion , that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate having a big yard. Most people in the older housing areas have a back yard and a front yard, not just a patch of grass in front of the door, but a place where children could play if they wanted to. Everyone’s yard is well kept, and free of dog poop, since dogs are only allowed out on leashes, and the people who don’t feel like walking their dogs have fenced in areas in the back yard.

The Speed Limit. The speed limit on post is strictly observed by the residents and enforced by the MPs. I don’t mean a “speed limit” where you can go nine miles an hour over it and not worry about getting a ticket. Here, if the speed limit is 35 mph, everyone goes 35 mph, and if the speed limit drops to 25 mph, you don’t just coast along until friction brings you back down under the speed limit - you hit the breaks until their speedometer reaches 25 mph. The speed limit in the housing areas is only 15 mph, which is a hard speed to drive since it feels like you are barely moving forward. Why do I like this? Because it takes all of the tension out of driving. You are never stuck behind someone going too slow, because everyone has to go slow. You always know when it is safe to merge or make a left turn because no one speeds up just to stay ahead of you.

One afternoon when my sister and her boyfriend were here (after barely getting on post because they didn’t have an insurance card as described above) they were pulled over in the housing area and asked “Is there a reason you are driving 25 mph in a housing area?” Their first impulse was probably to say, “Because you’re supposed to drive slow in the housing areas,” not realizing that they were actually 10 mph over the speed limit. Fortunately, they did not answer with their first impulse and were able to get away with a warning (and of course the endless teasing and grief that we have heaped on them since then).

The only problem with the speed limit is that it gives children the idea that streets are safe everywhere. They don’t understand that outside the gates, people are speeding, drinking coffee, and talking on their cell phones (not allowed on post), so they don’t have time to swerve and miss the kiddies who have mistakenly chased a ball into the street. Most of the other mothers and I attempt to make the kids look both ways and cross at the corner, but there is so little traffic (and the few cars around are moving so slowly) that it seems rather ridiculous to put them through the ritual. And really, what are they learning about real world street crossing? They’ll have to see cars rolling through stop signs and speeding down side streets before they can appreciate why they must stop and look. Fortunately, most of the other places that we visit are either slow paced or equipped with cross walks and signals.

The Playgrounds. The playgrounds in our housing areas have been plentiful and well maintained. In Kentucky, we had to walk down the street and across a field to get to the playground (which was made out of wood and inhabited every spring by borer bees, but the kids never seemed to mind), but it was worth the trip because it was one of those playgrounds designed for all ages, with progressively longer slides and higher places to climb as you worked your way across the equipment. Every so often we would drive to other newer playgrounds throughout post, just to get a change of scenery and to keep the kids interested. Here in Virginia, we have a little playground right out the back door, and three others a short walk away. There are swings (although I hate swings) at three of them. If we want to take a longer walk or drive, there is a huge new playground less than a mile away that is so impressive, I’ve been tempted to climb it myself (and not just to stop Marty from falling off).

The Sidewalks. I’m sure some people who read the paragraph above about playgrounds may be thinking to themselves, “We have playgrounds within walking distance too, but there is nowhere to walk.” Every post that I have visited has wide, well-maintained sidewalks that can take you almost anywhere you care to go. I don’t know what additional expense is required to put in sidewalks in new housing developments out there in the real world, but it seems like no expense could be too much. I hate to walk in the street, and I particularly hate to walk with my kids in the street. Having grown up in a city, I am used to having sidewalks, and have a great appreciation for them.

The Maintenance Crew. When our hot water heater, or heat, or air conditioner, or plumbing is not working, we can call a work order in at any time of day (depending on how dire the situation) and expect prompt service. For free. In Kentucky we had a rather unfortunate series of plumbing disasters that would cause water from the dishwasher or washing machine (and those are the only two sources that my brain will let me consider) to back up into the house. Usually, two plumbers with a mechanical snake would arrive at our house and fix the problem. They came at night, during the day, on the weekend, and one time at midnight on the night before Thanksgiving. Finally, they decided to bring in a backhoe, dig up our sewer outlet pipe, and replace it, and it was all done for free. One Saturday morning in December we woke up without heat, and we had not one but three visits from maintenance men that day, the last one to give us a few space heaters in case the heater broke again while they were waiting to get the part they needed.

The Neighbors. I have already done a dissertation on neighbors, so I won’t flog that again, but the neighbors you get on post are usually neighborly. The family housing areas are actually full of families, so there is not the usual contingent of sketchy meth-heads, crazy curmudgeons, or partying high school drop outs that neighborhoods on the outside have. Although I have not met a lot of my neighbors, they usually will say hello when you pass them on the sidewalk, and wave when they drive by the house and see you outside. Another advantage is that the neighborhoods are, like the Army, racially mixed. I went to college with more than one person who had spoken to a black person in their high school. Although my kids will not have the experience of growing up in a multi-ethnic and multi-racial place like Washington, at least they won’t be growing up in a mini North Dakota either.

The Surrounding Community. Although most army posts are encircled by a wide variety of peep shows, check cashing vendors, and pawn shops, they also provide easy access to good Korean and German food (since soldiers keep going off to Korea and Germany and marrying the locals). Sports teams and museums in nearby cities often sponsor military specials so that you can take your kids out for fun for cheaper. Most of the people that you meet in the stores or post office are either prior service, Army brats, or have children in the military, so they treat you like one of the family.

I think I have gotten a bit spoiled by all the services and safety that come along with living on post. When we were first married we looked at the rather shabby on-post housing available in Maryland and decided to live off post, but now that we qualify for better housing, I don’t know if we’ll ever buy a house before the HP retires. So what’s the downside? I guess the only downside is that sometimes we go to war. And if we go to war, on occasion your spouse may be sent away to a place where people want to shoot at him/her. But at least it’s not so scary for me to be alone in a neighborhood like this, and it gives the HP some piece of mind that the family is looked after and safe.

Fun in the Sun, Pain in the Rain

2006-05-11T22:12:00.000-04:00

Note to mothers of baby boomer age and older: The following post contains descriptions of an activity that may disturb you. Of course, I am referring to playing with play-doh. While I assure you that play-doh has a new formulation and no longer sticks to the rug, if you can’t believe it or the memories of trying to get play-doh out of the rug are just too raw, please stop reading where indicated.

In the springtime, when the weather dries up and warms up and we start spending every afternoon outside, I remember how easy it is to entertain the kids. While I do not consider myself a particularly “outdoorsy” girl and can’t say that camping or hunting hold any allure for me, I do make an attempt to get myself and the kiddies outside whenever it is not raining. Granted, last summer after about 21 days straight of sunshine, I declared a rainout (like in Bull Durham) and kept them indoors, but by and large, if the weather is fair, a little time outdoors does wonders for everybody’s disposition. Nearly everyone I know has a story of how a miserable, teething, colicky, sleep-deprived baby became a joy to behold the moment he/she was taken outdoors. Even as the kids grow older, something about all of the space above them and around them instantly opens their imagination, lifts some of the stress from their little shoulders, and puts a smile on a once cranky face. I have observed this phenomenon over and over again with my kids, which makes me wonder, why are we always alone outdoors?

I believe one major reason that we don’t see more people outside is parental fear. A sunburn 20 years ago was an unfortunate and painful experience, but if you let your child get sunburned now, you are responsible for setting him up to an almost certain bout with skin cancer. A mosquito bite 20 years ago was an itchy annoyance, but now it is a gateway to a potentially fatal disease. Ticks 20 years ago were a disgusting badge of honor for kids who spent too much time searching for baseballs under the hedges, now one bite may sentence a kid to devastating neurological trauma. But sunshine and bugs are not, in general, consciously out to get your kids, the way sexual predators, kidnappers, and other mayhem-inclined individuals are. The media coverage of victimized children would lead even the most level-headed parent to believe that every unfamiliar car passing through the neighborhood has come to snatch the children (but considering our neighborhood is protected by armed guards, this doesn’t seem like it should be as scary as it might be in other places). All of the potential harm that can come to our children now and in the future has been identified and itemized for us, so if we fall down on the job and let them get a sunburn or a bug bite, we have only ourselves to blame (and we definitely need more occasions for guilt).

I am afraid for my kids too, and I don’t want them to get sunburns or bug bites, and I certainly don’t want them in the same zip code with anyone who might hurt their feelings let alone their very lives. But I can use sunscreen to prevent the sunburn, bug spray to prevent the bug bites, and easiest of all, myself to keep them safe from everything else. But where is every one else? What does every one do inside all the time? I’m not asking because I feel superior, I’m asking because I’m desperate to know.

On a day like today, when the rain starts at breakfast and pours all day long, I find myself unable to come up with things that the kids can do that will take up a big chunk of time. I have been spoiled by the neighbor’s trampoline, which can entertain the kiddies for hours, until their little legs are shaking with exhaustion. I even let them play in the disgusting sand under the swings behind our house, because they are willing to sit there and play from after school until dinner time. For a while the playground was the site of a new imagination game every day, and I could just sit on the bench and hold the tissues while the kids entertained themselves. We’ve got t-ball, a basketball hoop, soccer balls, bean bags, horseshoes, golf clubs, jumpropes, sidewalk chalk – everything you might need to play outside. But inside…

Inside there is nowhere to jump, since the girls have bunkbeds and our bed is always covered with stuff (and since jumping is not encouraged). There is nowhere to dig, nothing to climb, and they are not allowed to take chalk and color everything in sight. We’ve got board games, we’ve got puzzles, we’ve got toys, but in the end, we’ve got lots of time to fill. We bake together, we do art projects, we read books, but I was not trained in childhood education, so I quickly run out of ideas. Even stretching (at times to the point of no return) the guidelines for TV and computer screen time, I am still left with a good part of the day with kids teetering on the brink of boredom and all the attendant whining and annoying behavior.

I have come up with exactly one activity that is special enough that the kiddies know if they walk away, it will be weeks or even months before they get another chance at it. One activity that takes up big chunks of time and never ends in tears: playing with play-doh.

Note to Grandmothers: stop reading here.

When we moved from Kentucky, I threw out all of our play-doh. Most of it was a rather spooky grey color, and I didn’t think it would fare too well sitting in storage during the heat of the summer. I didn’t replace the play-doh and thought that maybe the kids had forgotten about it. Then one afternoon Lauren brought home a goodie bag with a little tub of about a quarter of a cup of fake play-doh. That little tub of yellow play-doh was gold in our house, each kid patiently waiting for a turn to squish it and roll it on the table. The whole spectacle became rather pathetic, so when my brother called to see what he should get the kids for Christmas, I told him to get them all play-doh. Since my brother (who has no children) specifically chooses toys that either make a huge mess or a huge amount of noise, play-doh was his kind of present. He did not disappoint them. Between the three kids we got so much play-doh that we had to leave some behind at my parents’ house because I didn’t think I had a place to store it all. I had kept all of the play-doh toys that we had accumulated in Kentucky, so now we have a storage bin of play-doh and play-doh paraphernalia that would satisfy a small preschool.

The kids love to play play-doh, and sometimes after spending an hour playing, they will stop and have lunch and then go back to it for another hour. I used to be a little stressed out when the kids would start smushing all of the different playdoh colors together. How could you make a pink pig if the pink play-doh is streaked with green, purple, and orange? Then I finally realized that kids think the more colors something has, the prettier it is, so now I just open all the little containers and walk away. I don’t go too far though, because they always want to show me what they’ve made, and I don’t want them to have to carry the play-doh all over the house looking for me. Although the play-doh comes out of the rugs now, I hate spotting it weeks after it was dropped, because then I can’t immediately identify what it is (candy? crayon? bug?).

One big reason the kids love play-doh is the play-doh scissors and knives. I hover over them when they use the regular scissors, but they can be as destructive as they want with the playdoh scissors. Usually they work in teams, with one person making shapes and the other chopping them up. They also enjoy pretending that they are making cookies, since the opportunity to use cookie cutters generally only presents itself at Christmas time in our house. The only downside to play-doh is that all of the contraptions that are too hard for a small child to operate. The play-doh “fun factory” which makes spaghetti and other long shapes, has not changed since I was little, and you do need to put some weight on that handle to get the spaghetti out. The fun factory is also hard to clean out, so the kiddies usually need a grown up to pry the moving parts loose from the layer of solidified play-doh. But I’m willing to stop by the play-doh jobsite occasionally and put in a few minutes at the fun factory, because I get a little stretch of quiet time in exchange.

Yes, play-doh is a fine way to pass the time every now and again. But although I’ve made peace with the play-doh, I’d still rather take the kids outside. I’ve got my fingers crossed that no new menaces or pests or diseases pop up (I’m talking to you, bird flu). Once the play-doh becomes old hat, I’m done for.

Fires

2006-05-10T23:24:00.000-04:00

Note: This post was originally entitled "Light 'Em Up, Boys", until I realized that it was popping up on searches about the recent shooting. The search results that included that title plus information about the shooting might have given a fringe element the idea that the title referred to a post encouraging people to shoot policemen. Obviously it does not, but I'm changing it anyway.

Behind our house is an outdoor fireplace that I gave to the HP for his birthday a couple of years ago. This fireplace is currently filled to capacity with sticks and logs, and every time I find a stick in the yard, I usually stash it in the fireplace (or attempt to balance it on the overflowing pile of firewood next to the fireplace). The funny thing about that fireplace is that I will probably never light it, and not just because its springtime. I think the main thing that keeps me from taking a match to the pile is: I’m not a boy.

In conjunction with the HP's fireplace, I asked for a fleece blanket and some comfortable outdoor chairs for my birthday (8 days later) so that I could happily accompany him outside on the nights when he decided to sit by the fire. The first winter was windy and bitterly cold, so we did not go out often to sit by the fire. However, don’t take that to mean the fireplace was not used during that first winter. The HP would load it up with wood (or more often a Duraflame and a lot of sticks), light it up, and sit on the couch with one eye on the fire out the window, and the other on the TV. Every so often he would go out and poke at the fire or add wood too it, until he was either out of things to burn or ready for bed, and then he would let it burn out. Each spring he would drag it over to the side of the house and lovingly cover it with a tarp until the next fall. However, whenever we had a gathering with more than one or two male guests, the fireplace was always dragged back onto the porch and put into service.

I briefly wondered why the HP bothered with these fires that we were not going to sit by. However, I did not waste much time wondering, since everyone knows that all men are obsessed with fire, and no man has ever been able to give me a reason other than “I just like it.”

The Encarta Dictionary gives lots of definitions for fire (and I realize that this is a cheesy way to fill my 1500 words, but Wednesday is the one night of the week when I actually watch TV. I’m only doing the noun definitions here, just think how long this thing could be):

1. destructive burning of something: a situation in which something such as a building or an area of land is destroyed or damaged by burning.

Could it be that men are intrigued by fire because they are fascinated by destruction? I’ll leave aside the obvious remarks I could make about the current male leadership around the world and what has occurred at their hands. Instead I’ll focus on the one little man I see on a daily basis, the little Marty Boy. One of his new pastimes is to cheerfully announce “I’m going to make a big mess!” and start clearing table tops and throwing pillows off the couch. He’s not angry, and he’ll stop if I ask him to. But sometimes I just sit by and watch him, and he is having an absolute blast. How about it boys? Is it the thrill of destruction?

2. pile of burning fuel: a collection of material such as logs or coal that is set alight and used as fuel for heating, cooking, or burning something
3. blaze: the light, heat, and flames caused by something that is burning
4. process of burning: the rapid production of light, heat, and flames from something that is burning, e.g. in the combustion of wood, coal, or petroleum

These definitions obviously could describe what happens in a fireplace, but they also apply to the other great friend of all men – the grill. The grill is the one place that all men, anywhere, under any circumstance can find common ground. One guy may prefer a gas grill, another a charcoal one, but they are all going to stand around and stare at it and swap stories every time its lit up. I realize that the “men standing around the grill” scenario is one that has been overworked in TV shows and commercials over the years, but just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not an apt reflection of reality. I have used charcoal grills before at drunken barbecues, but I did not attempt the gas grill until recently. The ironic thing about grilling is, you are supposed to put the meat on there and then leave it alone. No man is able to do this, and yet men are usually the grillers in the family.

5. arms discharge from guns: a discharge of ammunition from one or more guns
6. arms launch of projectile: the process or timing of sending off a missile or rocket

Oh you boys and your guns. I am not about to launch into an anti-gun tirade here, as I sit in Army housing. I’m not stupid enough to think that we don’t need a military or police and that every one would blow kisses as they walked down the street if it wasn’t for guns. I don’t think hunters should be harassed (or shot by the Vice President, but that’s another story). I’ll just add this little quote from a story I read today in the Washington Post, and let you decide whether guns are properly regulated in this country (and if you are a responsible gun owner, I am not lumping you in with this guy, but I have to think things aren’t working the way they should be right now):

The HP is not a big lover of guns, and although he can easily qualify with his weapons for work, we don’t keep one in the house (we have other defenses, like sending Lauren out to argue with intruders until they leave in frustration). However, when I read the “missile or rocket” part, I could only think of one thing – fireworks. My brothers were obsessed with fireworks when we were younger. Not the kind that you sit in a stadium and watch, but the kind that you buy at the store. You ignite them and enjoy them, and then take a moment to count your fingers and toes and eyes to make sure you did it correctly. I imagine my brothers were inspired by our older male cousins who used to put on quite an alcohol soaked fireworks display at our annual 4th of July family reunion. The spinners that were supposed to be attached to a stationary object usually ended up spinning and sparking across the yard. Whenever one of the roman candles came up a few fireballs short, one of my cousins would run to go check it before one of the grown-ups, in a passing moment of sobriety, would tell them to leave it alone.

7. continuous attack: a series of things that follow each other quickly and relentlessly, especially if hostile or intimidating

I don’t have much to say about this one, but any of you that have been on the receiving end of one of my husband’s inquiries, I think you will agree that he is familiar with this type of fire. He can launch a series of questions with such rapidity that I rarely have time to complete my answer to one when the next question is coming at me. There are times when I have attempted to end one of these episodes with “That’s it; that’s all I know; I don’t know anything else; we have exhausted my knowledge on this topic.” And still the questions continue.

8. gem's brilliance: the shine and sparkle of a gemstone
9. passion: energy, spirit, or intensity of feeling

I guess these two describe why the boys are attracted to us girls. Lucky for us, a little sparkle can bring out the “energy, spirit, or intensity of feeling” for us. Of course, we need a lot more than sparkle if we want to be noticed when there is a fireplace around. Or a grill. Or a sparkler. Or a candle. Or even a match.

Rock On

2006-05-09T22:43:00.000-04:00

When I stopped working and moved to Kentucky, I became disconnected from the world of music, because I was no longer spending every morning in the car listening to the radio. I’m sure that if I had moved to Kentucky as a country music fan, I would be about as hip and up to date as they come. Since I am not a country music fan, I spent most of my time in the car in Kentucky listening to an 80s station. When that went off the air, I would listen to the same CD over and over, because I never remembered to bring an alternative into the car. I’m sure it didn’t help that while we were in Kentucky we eventually had three children who could speak and thus voice their preferences as to what entertainment was provided in the car and in the house. The HP was no help, since he disconnected from music sometime in the 70s, and has clung to the hits of that era as long as I have known him. He occasionally will toss out some mangled version of a line from a song that is currently on the radio (which is more than I can do), but he likes his music old. When he is not listening to music from the 70s (or 60s or 50s), he listens to Frank Sinatra (or Frank Sinali as the children call him).

My very first concert (that was not the Beach Boys or Wayne Newton on the 4th of July in Washington) was that hot, groundbreaking band from Down Under. AC/DC? No. INXS? No. Midnight Oil? No. Of course I am talking about Men at Work. Who else could it be now? When I was a freshman in high school, my good friend Trudy arranged for about 13 girls to see the concert at Merriweather Post Pavillion in Maryland and then come over to her house for a sleepover. I suppose this was a good concert to start with, since it gave me a chance to learn right from the get-go about bands that only have one hit. Without exception they are going to make you beg to hear it as an encore. This concert also gives me the winning answer when people are comparing stories of the first concert that they went to - few people (and those people are described in the next paragraph) can claim a worse show as their first concert.

Did I learn my lesson about going to the concerts of one-hit-wonders? No, I did not. When I was a freshman in college, my first friend Christina invited me to spend Columbus Day weekend at her house, since I couldn’t travel from Massachusetts to DC for a long weekend. The only plans that she had committed to that weekend were to attend a concert with her sister who had graduated from college the year before. I am not sure what exactly transpired between those two sisters, but I guess it can stand as a testament to the bond between siblings and what you are willing to do with them. In the first few weeks of college, Christina had tutored me in the music of OMD, Erasure, Depeche Mode, and all sorts of other New Wave bands. The concert that she and I attended with her sister did not involve any of these bands. No, the concert I saw on Columbus Day weekend 1986 was a one-hit-wonder even worse than Men At Work. If you were alive during the 1980s and you wrack your brain long enough, you can probably come up with it. Give up? It was Aha (or A-Ha or AHa, I’m not sure what the proper spelling is). Take on me (Take on me) Take me on (Take on me)...

That concert was a horror show. The entire theater (somewhere in Hartford, Connecticut, but I don’t care to ever revisit it) shook from the time we arrived until the time we left with the screams of 14 year old girls. Christina and I just looked at each other and at the screaming teenies around us and wondered why her sister had thought this was a good idea. I believe Aha was a Norwegian band that didn’t speak any English, but they didn’t need to speak English. If they had stood on stage filing their nails and whistling, the screaming would not have diminished. Just when we thought our evening couldn’t get any stranger, two screaming girls in wheelchairs fled the handicapped section in front of us and rushed the stage. We were briefly worried for their safety, but in the end worried for our own, since if any of the frenzied fans had seen the look of confusion and disinterest on our faces, they likely would have rushed us too. I don’t remember if Aha saved their hit for the encore (they did not have any equipment that could amplify noise louder than the screaming girls), but I think they sang it at least twice.

The other concerts that I attended in college were not much better. The Spring Weekend committee that was in charge of booking the big campus concert was apparently composed of students who hated music and wanted to save money. For the first three years they decided that the most economical choice was a band that clung to the following career trajectory: Each one had: 1) peaked in the early 80s; 2) gotten used to fame and spending lots of money; 3) plummeted in popularity; and 4)was thus desperate for a gig to pay the bills. Freshman year it was Squeeze, sophomore year it was Kool and the Gang, junior year it was The Hooters. Senior year we had Ziggy Marley who followed a slightly different trajectory – never peaking, never caring about money, and thus willing to play for peanuts at a small school in New England. College was also my first introduction to the mania of U2 fans (much like Bare Naked Ladies fans and Dave Matthews Band fans), how they continually one up each other (I liked them from their first album. Well, I liked them from a concert they did while they were still in high school. Well I liked them from when they were singing nursery rhymes in kindergarten), and how they become slightly nutty in their quest for concert tickets. I did not get to see U2 in concert in college, mainly because I was unable to spend a week sleeping outside the Worcester Spectrum, and thus was branded as a fair weather fan.

In the early 1990s, my concert going luck turned around. My sister and I saw every show that came through Philadelphia, and as a result had a chance to rate the tours of many, many, long forgotten bands, including: Ziggy Marley, Gin Blossoms, Cracker, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Stereo MCs, Belly, Matthew Sweet, The Posies, X, Velocity Girl, Screaming Trees, Soul Asylum, Spin Doctors, Smashing Pumpkins, George Clinton & the P.Funk All-Stars, The Breeders, A Tribe Called Quest, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, L7, Boredoms, Courtney Love, Lemonheads, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Midnight Oil, Grant Lee Buffalo. We also got to see some people who did find fame and success, including: INXS, Iggy Pop, The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, The Who, Eric Clapton, Elvis Costello, Tom Petty, Beastie Boys, and REM. We spent all of our extra money on concert tickets, and had a blast every time, even in the pouring rain.

These days, I don’t think I’d go to a concert unless it was in a bar or I was taken there by limo and deposited in a sky box with a bar included – I just feel like I’m too old and too disconnected. I also feel like I’m too poor. Although the WHFStival still seems to be a bargain, all of the geezers that I would go see are charging so much money that I can’t go just on principle. Why do they need so much money? I thought they were all off the drugs. Sadly the next concert I attend will probably be as a chaperone for my girls who want to go see some horrific boy band in six or seven years (wait a minute, note to self: make cool Aunt Kate or cool Aunt Erin take them). At least when they are older, I won’t feel too afraid to let them go to concerts on their own (although the HP will likely need sedation). I saw pretty much everything that can happen at a concert during my concert going days (well, no shootings) and while the media may emphasize the craziness, even the drunkest, most drugged out attendee is usually there for the music and unlikely to bother other people who came for the music too.

Clearly my pop culture lapse happened at exactly the wrong time, when the world of MP3 players and IPods was just around the corner. I actually have an MP3 player and it is full of songs from the last century. I don’t know how I could ever catch up on the five years of music I missed. I continue to follow the bands I knew from my younger days, but all of the CDs that have come into my possession in the past five years (with the exception of Christmas music and children’s music) were purchased by the HP as gifts for me. Then again, my parents went with us to concerts (Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton) when they were in their 50s, and really enjoyed them (even more on the occasions that they had hearing protection). Maybe 20 years from now my kids will convince me to head out to the arenas once again.

Insert Bridge Cliche Here

2006-05-08T21:25:00.000-04:00

Since my husband left the country, I have made several trips to my parents’ house in Delaware. This is a five hour drive with three restless but generally cooperative kids in the back seat, and it includes a trip across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. Until last summer, I had never been across that bridge and didn’t know anything about it. Now, my husband jokes, I am likely to pay enough in tolls on the bridge this year to sponsor a repaving project next year. The toll in each direction is $12, and the bridge does not offer any frequent traveler discount book or EZPass reduction. If you are going back and forth in 24 hours, you can cross for $5, but I can’t imagine any circumstances that will cause me to take two 5 hour trips in 24 hours. So every time I go off to visit someone coastal, I will be dropping $24 right off the top. The strangest thing about this exorbitant toll is that I am happy to pay it, because the trip across that bridge is worth every penny.

When I am traveling across the Bridge Tunnel, and the water is as blue as the sky, and the waves are sparkling in the sun as they slowly roll onto the sandy dunes, the urge to pull over just to spend some time staring is almost irresistible (but less appealing when I’m traveling with my three favorite companions). In fact, the bridge has several scenic lookouts for people who are overcome by the urge to stop. And the scenery is impressive in every sort of weather. The kids always check the water when we head out across the Bridge Tunnel, because it never looks the same way twice. Sometimes it is completely flat, sometimes it has small waves, sometimes there are breakers right in the middle of the bay. On Friday, the weather was hazy, and the sky and water were almost the same color of grey when I looked to the east. When I looked out to the west however, the other span of the bridge was blocking the horizon, making it impossible to tell where the water stopped and the sky began, making me feel like I was traveling along the edge of the earth. On Sunday, when the weather was worse, every aspect of the scenery was its own shade of grey - the road, the sky, the street lamps, the ships - and in the long stretches where there are no signs or other cars, I felt like I was traveling in a black and white photograph. The sunsets are amazing, and I imagine the sunrises are too, although I am sure I will never witness one myself.

Although the Bridge Tunnel extends over a 20 mile stretch of water, it is a lot less scary than other roads that do not even cross over water. For one thing it is low and flat, unlike the other Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Annapolis which provides drivers to acrophobics who are afraid to cross the bridge. In fact the Bridge Tunnel is so low and flat, that it gives you the reassuring feeling that the impact wouldn’t kill you if you were for some reason forced off the bridge and into the water. Another huge advantage to the Bridge Tunnel is that the odds of being forced off the road and into the water are rather low, since the traffic is sparse and the bridge is wide – the southbound span has a breakdown lane for its entire length. The Bridge Tunnel is also extremely well lit, with street lights every 20 yards or so for its entire length. The disconcerting part of its architecture is the tunnels, where the traffic from both spans comes together to pass through a tunnel that is one lane in each direction. The tunnels are short and bright, but rather tight, particularly when an 18-wheeler is barreling toward you just inches from the center line. Another problem with the tunnels is that as you come around a curve on the bridge, you can sometimes see the missing bridge sections where the road travels through the tunnels. It looks as if the bridge you are driving on is about to come to an abrupt end, which always gives me a quick uneasy feeling, even though I know (for the most part) that I’m not about to drive off the end of the bridge.

So what is there to look at besides the architecture? How about birds? On calm days, you can often see a sea gull perched on top of every street light. On windy days, you can often see the remains of unlucky sea gulls splattered beneath every street light. While I find both live and dead sea gulls rather disgusting on the beach, I can appreciate them from the confines of my car. According to the Bridge Tunnel website, the wetlands leading up to the bridge on the north side have all kinds of birds in them, like pelicans, ducks, herons, and peregrine falcons (which I may have seen the other day, I saw some big hulking bird that looked like a hawk – my dad suggested that it may have been an osprey – in this instance, I wish I knew more about birds). Often you can see groups of birds circling and diving in the same part of the water, probably to the dismay of the fishies underneath.

But the fishies have other things to worry about. In every sort of weather you can always see a number of guys fishing from small motor boats near the bridge. The Navy and Coast Guard train in the bay, so on most trips across the bridge you can see boats and ships of all sizes, some of them moving at shocking speeds, up and down the bay. The tunnels were obviously built to accommodate them as well as the wide variety of cargo ships and barges that travel through the bay. Things are usually so hopping on the water, that I can point out enough boats that every kid manages to spot one, alleviating the sort of extended crying jag that can erupt when two of them see a cow and one misses it. With the Navy and the Coast Guard close at hand (and the small amount of traffic) I don’t eye the boats up for potential terrorists the way I do on some other bridges. However, on Friday, a day when the water was perfectly still, we saw a guy on a small motorboat that was rocking so violently I wondered if his companions were having a Sopranos’ style tussle below deck.

In the middle of the bridge is a rest stop with a fishing pier, restaurant, and gift shop, but I have never stopped there, because while I think the bridge is perfectly safe, I don’t really feel the need to linger out there, particularly since I know I couldn’t singlehandedly save the kids if the fishing pier fell into the water. Other people stop though, because sometimes with your $12 toll you get a coupon for a free soda at the restaurant. The rest stop is probably very safe too, since the Bridge Tunnel has its own police force to scare everyone into driving the speed limit. According to their web page, the Bridge Tunnel employs 165 people, including, I’m sure, a few full time bird carcass removers. I’d be very interested to see if they scoop the birds into a bag, or over the side into the water, which I guess would be one way to attract bigger sporting fish.

I don’t just enjoy the Bridge Tunnel, I enjoy the fact that when I travel the Bridge Tunnel route, I do not have to drive on I-95, the capital beltway, Route 50, and Route 404 (the main roads that make up the alternate route for traveling from our part of the world to the Delaware shore). Although the roads we travel to and from the Bridge Tunnel are small and run through many small towns where the speed limit drops to 35 mph, they are stress-free for the most part. I have yet to see any road rage by the occupants of the few other cars and trucks traveling along with us. Anyone who has lost huge chunks of their life in traffic around Washington, DC, (or huge parts of their weekend to the lines at the tolls for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Annapolis) would likely agree with me that if the Bridge Tunnel toll was changed one finger rather than $12, there would be a huge increase in the hook-wearing population.

I was surprised to read that the first span of the Bridge Tunnel was built in 1965 (when it was voted One of Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World), and the second was not finished until 1999. I don’t think I would have traveled across it when it was only one span, because it would have been a little claustrophobic. But now it has two spans and so I highly recommend the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel to everyone. However, given the amount of traffic I’ve seen on it, few people have business that takes them out that way. So for everyone who has no business at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, I highly recommend the Bridge Tunnel web page, which is quite informative and has lots of pretty pictures.

Boo Boos

2006-05-05T12:45:00.000-04:00

Yesterday as I was attempting to load the kids into the car for a trip to the Walton Elementary Book Fair and Cookout, I heard a small yelp and turned around to see Marty airborne in the driveway. He crashed to the ground hands first and started to cry, but when I picked him up I didn’t see any scrapes on his palms. He calmed himself down pretty quickly (I’m not sure where he picked that up, being surrounded by his dramatic sisters all the time) and wiped his nose on my shirt (of course). I looked all around the area where he fell, but I couldn’t find anything that could have caused him to stumble, let alone leave the ground completely. I asked him what happened but unfortunately though he is quite a talker, his powers of description are not what one would consider crystal clear. I didn’t see any point in continuing my investigation, so I went to buckle him in and saw that one of his knees looked pretty scraped up. There weren’t many red scrapes, but there were a lot of superficial white ones, and it looked like a bad enough injury to explain the snot on my shoulder, so off we went.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when the kids fall, I should be surprised that they don’t fall more often. At times it seems that one blade of grass leaning the wrong way in the lawn is enough to bring them down. Although they run in and out of their bedroom doors all the time, every once in a while they bang their head on the door knob, and I always ask, “how did that happen?” and they never know. When you buckle them in for a car ride, it seems like they should be safe for a while, provided that they don’t get car sick or choke on something, and yet while riding in the car one afternoon, Aislinn managed to get her lip caught in a barrette. Another afternoon she managed to get her arm caught between two car seats. If you put them in a padded room, they would probably manage to scrape their finger on the stitching. Then again, there are times when they are teetering with one leg in the air and the other foot halfway off the playground and somehow they manage to right themselves.

Since the kids began borrowing the neighbors’ trampoline, they have had the occasional turned ankle or bent knee (although those are nothing given the wide array of injuries that are possible on a trampoline). In the hierarchy of boo boos, these are the injuries that make the kids angriest, since there is no outward sign of them and nowhere to put a band-aid. They also don’t care for bumps and bruises, but at least they can show them off even if they can’t score a band-aid. Everyone’s favorite injury (once the pain has subsided) is a big knee scrape during shorts weather that can have a big Elmo band-aid. This injury can be described at length and shown to playmates, teachers, and neighbors to score some much desired attention and sympathy.

Bandages are another problem. Every kid I know loves band-aids and wants them to cover every teeny scrape that they find. One day I realized that I was wasting huge chunks of my life debating with the kids over which injuries needed covering and which didn’t, so now I just hand over the band-aid as soon as it’s requested. Unfortunately, somehow Aislinn convinced herself (and when I wasn’t looking, her sister and brother) that band-aids should never get wet. When she was little she would attempt to dodge her bath because she didn’t want the band-aid to get wet and bring about whatever horrible consequence that followed (now she only protests for a few seconds, or pulls the band-aid off before she gets in). When we finally got her in the tub, she would insist on keeping her knee (or finger or whatever part was bandaged) out of the water, and would give us nonstop instructions while washing her hair to make sure we didn’t splash the band-aid. I would sing the “I am stuck on Band-Aid brand cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me…” jingle for her, but she didn’t believe me (I’m hoping some sort of Johnson & Johnson anniversary will bring that commercial back, because if the kids see it on TV, maybe they’ll believe me). She would agree to keep her scrapes uncovered if we told her she was having a bath later that day, but once the band-aids were on, there was no taking them off.

I’m happy to say that I haven’t scraped my knees in quite some time. However, I can still remember what it’s like the night after you get a big scrape, when your knee is red and burning and sticking to the sheets so you can’t fall asleep. My two worst scrapes occurred when I was in high school, theoretically years past the time when I should be getting big scrapes. The first occurred when I fell on a gravel track during an ill-advised attempt to join the track team. It left me with a blue scar, caused I believe, by gravel dust that is still in my knee. For years afterward people would look at my knee and say “What happened?” and then look at me as if I had a screw loose when I said “That’s not a bruise, it’s a scar.” The other scrape occurred during an ill-advised attempt to work at an afterschool program with a bunch of punk kids. I was playing freeze tag with them and slipped on some gravel (gravel is not my friend) and gave myself a scrape on the leg that was about six inches long and three inches wide. I took this scrape with me to Beach Week, and although I was in a boozy exhausted haze most of the time, I took care of that scrape with the dedication of Florence Nightengale to ensure that I didn’t get another gross scar to match the gravel one. Later during Beach Week, I fell climbing over a fence and scraped my other knee which needed bandaging. By the last night some super funny drunk guy asked me if I had tripped a land mine.

But my experience at Beach Week isn’t really that unusual, since injuries for the kids seem to come in groups. One day last week Lauren hyperextended her knee on the trampoline, then banged her head on the door when she was coming back inside, and to round off the day, fell into the bathtub as she was brushing her teeth. Whenever the kids have a run like that, I begin to wonder “Do they need glasses? Do they need bigger shoes? Do they need smaller shoes? Do they need their inner ears examined?” But the next day, their coordination will return, and they’ll be back on their feet, balancing on curbs and jumping over rocks without any problems.

And sometimes the same injury happens over and over again. I suppose that can be a sign of bad parenting, but usually it is a sign that your kids aren’t heeding your sensible advice. One morning in Kentucky as I was standing in the kitchen, Lauren came running down the hallway in her socks and then attempted to make the turn into the kitchen. Her feet flailed under her like a cartoon character as she attempted to stop her momentum, but in the end it was just too slippery and she crashed into the door frame, producing a huge walnut-sized lump on her forehead. About a week later, Marty did the exact same thing, and ran his big dome into the exact same spot in the door frame to produce a matching lump on his forehead. We were surprised that none of the neighbors took us aside to suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t discipline the children my smacking them on the side of the head.

For all the bumps and bruises and falls, we have not had to take a child to the emergency room for stitches or broken bones. We’ve had several ear infections, one bug bite on the eye, and one “nursemaid’s elbow” that sent us to the hospital, but compared to some parents, we’ve definitely gotten off easy. While I was working at the book fair earlier this week, one kid came in with a walker and said he’d been in a motorcycle accident. Granted he was a punk fourth-grader and was probably sitting in his driveway when the motorcycle fell on him, but at least we are parenting well enough that our kids aren’t telling stories like that. Marty's leg looked much better this morning. In fact, the whole mess was reduced to one tiny scratch on his knee. He said it was painful, "This skyscraper is hurting my leg," but he never even asked for a band-aid.

I've Got A Secret

2006-05-04T22:00:00.000-04:00

Anyone who has ever asked me to keep a secret will probably agree that I am pretty good at it. If you have a secret that you would like to leak, I am not the person to tell, because most of the time it will not get any farther than me. I’m no Scooter. In my world there are three secret rules:

Similarly, in my world secrets have certain parameters that prevent them from being outright lies:

Sometimes people tell secrets (like “I think I accidentally kissed my best friend’s boyfriend when I was drunk”) hoping that I will take that information and do a little judicious investigating (like “So, did anything strange happen at the party last night?”) and then report the results back (like “ she said ‘I have no idea, I was so drunk’”). But I’ve never been much of an investigator because I’m always afraid I’ll blow the secret, and when it comes to other people’s dramas, I like to stay on the sidelines. Plus, as long as you don’t do any investigating, you don’t become part of the situation and you can sit back and watch it play out (like when the boyfriend finally remembers what happened and trots it out mid argument with his girlfriend who then comes by to drop the hammer on her former best friend).

The first real secret I asked the HP to keep, he blew. We got engaged on a Sunday night right before I left on a business trip. We agreed that we would tell our parents in person the next weekend. We went down to my parents’ house on Friday night and told everybody, and then the next day we went to his parents’ house to tell them. Little did I know, he had already spilled the beans to them, but instead of telling me, our little secret became their little secret (and it did not conform to my secret parameters as described above). When I found out months later that the whole “engagement announcement” had been a charade designed to keep me from getting angry, I was angry. I would say that I was five times angrier than I would have been if he’d told me the truth, but if he had told me the truth in the first place, I probably wouldn’t have been angry at all, because I knew he told out of overwhelming happiness not sneakiness. Clearly, if he had told his family and they all had agreed not to tell me, they should have at least followed Rule #3. (If you were able to follow the preceding paragraph, I commend you. If you were not, I apologize to you. At least it is a demonstration of what tricky business secrets can be.)

That was my first introduction to my husband’s family and their trouble with secrets. Like many people, they don’t tell secrets for gossip’s sake, they tell secrets because they are either overwhelmed with enthusiasm for what is going to happen or overwhelmed by the need to plan for what is going to happen. When they buy someone a gift, they are bursting to tell about it from the moment they leave the store, because they can hardly wait for the happiness that it is going to bring. When a surprise visitor or party or outing is in the works, they often absentmindedly reveal the surprise because they love to discuss plans for future things they are going to do. However, when seriously asked to keep a secret, they will make a concerted effort (usually successful) to resist these impulses. Once released from their promise they will describe the stress they were under, and the energy they needed to suppress the urge to talk, and all the times that they almost blew it but didn’t. So to be kind, we usually only tell them secrets of very short duration.

The next three secrets that my husband and I agreed to keep, he had to keep or risk an atomic argument. Having started out our marriage with the Engagement Secret Incident, I found it very hard to believe that he could keep any secret, but when I became pregnant with each of our kids, he did (as far as I know - his family may have learned rule #3). In fact, the lengthy explanations that I subjected him to time and time again about why he must not spill the secret were probably more than adequate payback for the Engagement Secret Incident.

Of course once the kids arrived, I remembered that kids like secrets more than anyone, and our kids are no exceptions. Aislinn doesn’t so much tell me secrets as tell me things quietly (like “I’m still hungry” five minutes after dinner or “Can I have another treat?” while the candy is still stuck in her teeth) in hopes she’ll get a different reaction than she would if she said them out loud. Lauren secrets are usually things that everybody knows, but that she thinks are so special that they should be said in a special way (today it was “Diego and Alicia don’t just save animals that are in trouble, they help them find their mommies,” pausing to put a hand on my arm and smile angelically “and daddies”). Marty’s secrets are my favorite of all. In the manner of many small children, he takes my head in his hands to turn my ear toward him, then uses his palm to push my hair out of the way, then leans in close and breathes heavily two or three times while trying to think of something to say (today it was “Is this song going to be over?”). Really, they could all tell me secrets all day and I wouldn’t mind; I like being the person they chose to confide in, even when they’ve got nothing to confide.

These days, as far as I can think of, all of my secrets are the ones I am keeping from my kids (Santa, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy – and technically, if Aislinn and Lauren find out before Marty, four of us will know the secret, in violation of my secret parameters). My parents never had to worry about spilling those secrets to me, since my best friend’s parents decided when we were in kindergarten that they were sick of pretending, so they told her about Santa Claus and she told me. I think my kids will probably be relieved to find out that these jokers aren’t real since they are completely afraid of them (in our version of Christmas we meet Santa out on the lawn and bring the presents in). The main thing that keeps me from telling them is that right now I can blame Santa if they don’t get what they ask for at Christmas.

So my dear friends and family, in conjunction with the secret rules and parameters described above, I have decided now to let you in on what I have been doing for the past month or so. If you read The Beginning you will find out why I started writing this stuff, and now that you know, please do not feel I am expecting you to read all of this. It started off as a secret endeavor because I didn’t know how it would turn out. If I only had 10 days worth of essays in me before writer’s block took me by the arm and sat me on the couch in front of the TV, well I really didn’t need everyone I knew to be a witness to that. I guess I could have written them all and kept them on my hard drive, but by posting them, I could challenge myself to keep up with the writing. This little blog is the reason I never know about the news, never know what’s on TV, never send prompt e-mails (I’m talking to you Mrs. Berlin), and never get to bed before midnight.

On the few occasions that I write about people other than myself, the HP, and the kids (excluding the producers of ER), I am not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings (and obviously, I am not trying to hurt the feelings of the HP or the kids either, but they are stuck with me). If anything you read here makes you feel that I am being rude or disrespectful to you, please don’t keep it a secret. Ask me for an explanation or to reword something that you think is making you look bad (and bear in mind that the people who read this either don’t know you, or know you and like you already). I am the only one who should be looking bad on these pages.

So that’s my secret. I hope you can find something entertaining to read here. Some of it is crappy, and some of it is funny if I do say so myself. None of it has been edited or even really reread very thoroughly so please forgive the rough edges. Maybe next year I’ll start a new blog called “A Year In Editing,” featuring cliche removal and tense matching. But for now this will be as ambitious as I get. Thanks.

Lame Reviews of Great Books That Taught Me Things I Never Knew

2006-05-02T22:59:00.000-04:00

Of all the many, many changes in my life that came with the arrival of my kids, the one that surprised me most was that I lost the impulse to read. For me, in the foggy exhaustion that comes with a baby in the house, sleep won out over almost everything. However, when Aislinn was almost two and we moved to Kentucky and I stopped working, I could actually hear my brain beginning to shrivel up from lack of use. I knew that if I ever wanted to be able to relate to my friends and family back in the east coast hotbed of breaking news, political intrigue, and social commentary, I was going to have to make some effort to keep from becoming a hillbilly (I let my kids become hillbillies because young hillbillies are cute, it’s the old late blooming hillbillies that creep people out). Since my reading time is limited and since for a long time I have not lived anywhere that had a paper with a reliable book review, I decided on a foolproof strategy for reading the right books: I only read books that have won awards or have at least been nominated for awards.

This strategy has led me to read a number of books that never would have found their way into my basket if I had been given all of the time in the world in a bookstore with every book in the world. It also started me on nonfiction, which I never read much of in the past. Sure, I read The Perfect Storm and Into Thin Air like everyone else, but in the past six years I have read and loved a number of biographies and histories (books about things that happened in the past, I don’t know if there is a technical word for them but if there is I didn’t learn it while studying chemistry in college). Every book has included things that came as an absolute shock to me. Considering I went to college and graduate school, I wish I was better informed about people and incidents in our country’s past, but I guess no one knows everything. I took some English classes in college, but I guess I should have taken more history. Here are some examples of things I didn’t know.

Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle (winner of the National Book Award) is an account of a black family that moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit in the 1920s, and the horrible situations that arose from the seemingly innocuous fact that a successful black doctor wanted to raise his family in a nice house in a good neighborhood. I can’t possibly describe the whole plot in 1500 words, but take it from me, if you read this book you will be fascinated and unable to put it down. As if the story of Doctor Ossian Sweet and his family is not enough, this book is full of facts from the time that I didn’t know and I imagine many other people don’t either. From this book I learned that the Ku Klux Klan almost took over Detroit in the 1920s. I had always thought that the KKK was a southern institution that stayed in the south, but in Detroit in 1924, it had 35,000 members. In 1925, KKK candidates almost claimed the entire Detroit city government. I also never realized that people could put covenants in their deeds that stated that their homes could never be sold to black people (or other immigrants or religions depending on how prejudiced they were). I remember taking sociology in college and learning about the segregated neighborhoods in Chicago, but I thought they were formed by intimidation and economic pressures. I don’t remember learning that it was encoded in language in the deeds.

Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea (finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction) is the story of twenty-six men from Mexico who attempted to enter the US through the desert in Arizona. Since their guides were inexperienced and lost, fourteen of the illegal immigrants ended up dead before their trip was over. In addition to not remembering this incident, if it got any nationwide press, I did not know much about what goes on at the border in Mexico, on either side of the line. A lot of what this book taught me I would rather not know, such as the details of how your body eventually cooks itself when you are out in the sun and heat for days on end. It also provides a humanizing description of the immigrants and the border patrol which are two groups that are easy to caricature or at least stereotype. I had no idea what happens to illegal immigrants when they are caught, or what type of people the “coyotes” are. Considering the current hullabaloo about immigration, I’m glad I read it.

Master of the Senate by Robert Caro (2003 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction) is part three of a four part biography on Lyndon Johnson. Never, under any circumstances, would I have sought out information about Lyndon Johnson. Before I read this book, the only things I knew about him were that he was the godfather of a boy I went to grade school with, and that the tapes of his conversations with Jackie Kennedy after the assassination gave me the creeps. But this book provides so much more information besides the life and times of Lyndon Johnson (who was a little on the crazy side if you ask me – I’d like to think he could never be elected these days using his tactics, but he was very adaptable and probably would have found a way to win). Caro could have written a book just based on his descriptions of the lives of women in rural Texas before electricity. The backbreaking labor and unrelenting hardness of their lives makes me wonder how long I would have lasted if I had been born in those times (and also makes me cringe regarding a future biography of George W. Bush that will be written in the future detailing the hardships of the poor that were ignored by the country during his presidency). This book is also a primer on the US Senate and how it operates, and as such should be read by every red-blooded American (in the words of Sister Michaela who used that logic to force us to read Moby Dick and to memorize the Gettysburg Address and Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty or give me death…” speech).” This book is so well written and fascinating, it prompted me to read the other two volumes of the biography, and I eagerly await the fourth – in fact I want to e-mail Robert Caro to make sure he is taking care of himself so that nothing happens to him before the book is finished.

I read Personal History by Katharine Graham (1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography) while I was pregnant with, and for a while, in labor with my second daughter. I probably would have read it eventually anyway, since All the President’s Men is one of my favorite books of all time, but even with my pledge to read award winners, it took me three years to get to it. Although it probably appeals to Washingtonians and readers of the Washington Post more than it appeals to the average person, it is still a great read. Katharine Graham is easy to dismiss as a person with money and advantages who fell into a family job at the right time. However, when you read how things happened in her own words, she comes across like any other person, unsure of exactly what she should do but determined to do the best job she can. Her husband was a bit crazy and abusive, and still she stood by him, driving me to distraction with her explanations and excuses of his behavior. When he came to his tragic end, as awful as it is to say, I was relieved for her, because she could never have achieved what she did if he had stayed around. Shortly after I read Personal History, I read Ben Bradlee’s autobiography (which understandably did not win any awards – it is a piece of crap- but my brother had a copy so I read it). His self congratulatory drivel makes Personal History stand out even more as a great autobiography.

So there you have it folks, my first attempt at book reviewing, and I must admit, a pretty crappy one at that. I have lent some of these books to other people, so I don’t have them at my fingertips to reread and revisit. I suppose reviewing books that have already received the highest awards in the country is a bit ridiculous, but my main motivation is to encourage you to take a look at them especially if, like me, you never would have thought to. These books are full of information and entertaining too. If you don’t have time to read 3000 pages of biography on Lyndon Johnson, at least read Arc of Justice or Personal History. You won’t be sorry.

Stumped

2006-05-01T23:09:00.000-04:00

Today is Spring Clean Up day on post, and it is one of those days when you have to determine just how much effort you are going to expend on a house that is not your own. I want the house to look presentable, but some people throw themselves into the competition for the coveted “Yard of the Month” (and 2nd and 3rd place) sign. Either approach eventually brings you face to face with the beautification efforts of the previous inhabitants. If you are lucky, like my neighbors across the street, you will find that the previous occupant has planted beautiful perennials all around the house, so that all you need to do is watch them come up and then admire them. If you are unlucky, you will find that the previous occupant had a screw loose. I am unlucky.

Along the front of our house is a white railing that stretches along the front walk, from the carport to the front door. This railing is rather nice looking, and was a handy place to hang some Christmas lights last December. Along the front of the railing is a narrow “flower bed” containing a row of “bushes.” When we moved into the house, the “bushes” were the most pathetic plant life I had ever seen, and were completely surrounded by weeds. Each “bush” was about 8 inches tall, with random sprigs shooting up 12 to 18 inches higher. The “bushes” were not arranged in any sort of symmetrical pattern or evenly spaced. They were so ridiculous looking that I cringed every time we drove up to our house. So I did what every enterprising American would do, I loaded up the kids and headed out to Home Depot for a pair of clippers and some mulch.

My entire bank of knowledge regarding cutting back plants comes from a Martha Stewart episode I saw once. She said not to cut of the tips of the plant, but to remove the offending branches by cutting them further down, closer to the trunk so that they will grow back better. Armed with this knowledge and my new clippers, I decided to attack the “bushes” to see if I could improve the eyesore in front of the house. But first, I decided I’d weed, since weeding is an activity that can be performed with the children close at hand. I knew that they would want to help, but they wouldn’t really like weeding, so they would go back to the playground when it was time for me to brandish the hardware.

The weeding episode was a bit of a revelation. Apparently, I did not have bushes in front of my house; I had the ghosts of bushes past. Some prior resident had apparently decided that he did not want to spend time trimming bushes, so instead he cut them all back to stumps in an attempt to kill them. He didn’t realize, however, that plants (outdoor perennials anyway) have had millions of years to evolve. If you leave them some roots and a little stem, and if they get lucky with a little rain and a little sunshine, chances are they can get themselves going again. He had successfully killed two out of ten of them (which explained why the others were so oddly spaced), but the rest made a comeback. Unfortunately, desperate for survival and robbed of their structure, they sent up little branches from all the sides of the stump in all different directions. Nothing grew from the top of the stump so each “bush” was similar to the top of a monk’s head, with leaves all around but none really on top. The “bushes” had attempted a comb over of sorts, with branches crossing over the bald spot, but it was still rather obvious that things were thin there in the middle.

I did the best I could last fall, trimming each little “bush” into a low, ground cover looking plant, until they were all basically the same size. I put cedar mulch all around them so that at least the whole row would smell pretty good and look neat. When I had done all I could do, I was pretty happy with the result. It was a weird little “flower bed” but it looked as if some one had tended to it. I suppose what that “flower bed” needs is an extreme makeover, but I am not going to stop by the Home Depot for a stump remover, particularly for someone else’s house. But this weekend, I weeded it again, and bought some ornamental grasses and day lilies and planted them as close as I could to the dead stumps (as you might imagine, it is quite hard to dig a hole next to a stump) to fill in the blanks and make the “flower bed” look more complete. I trimmed the “bushes” again and remulched the whole thing, and it really doesn’t look too bad anymore. Thinking about it, I am kind of glad that some crack pot gardener maimed those plants, because judging from the size of the stumps, they must have been quite substantial, and I am not a girl who loves a hedge. I have seen some of the other houses in the neighborhood that obviously got the same ten bushes when they were built, and the hedge completely obscures the railing, which makes me wonder what purpose the decorative white railing now serves.

We have other “bushes,” placed at the four corners of the house for reasons known only to the original planters, and no doubt baffling to any sort of gardening professional or person who has ever seen landscaping before. The “bushes” have no shape at all and sit so close to the ground that they look more like bean bags than plants, so this spring I decided to give them a good trim. After I had trimmed all of the crazy long branches that were shooting up from the top, they still didn’t look any better, so I decided to try to make a little room between the ground and the bottom of the “bush.” What I found under the worst “bush,” beneath the branches and dead leaves, was a huge stump – another victim of the plant slayer. Of course, I discovered that all of the “bushes” had suffered at the hands of the hedge hater, and I knew that although I had done my best to rehabilitate them, they would never truly be the same. Then this evening, as I sat in my neighbor’s yard while the kids were on the trampoline, I realized that the tree in their backyard looked very familiar. Suddenly, I realized where I had seen those leaves before - the worst “bush” in our yard was not a bush at all, but the remnants of a tree. How embarrassing for the poor little guy, starting out life as a tree, and ending up a bean bag bush.

This prompted me to turn my attention to another group of plants on the estate that need attention - the crape myrtles in the tree belt. I know two things about crape myrtles: they are pretty and they send up little shoots from the bottom of the trunk every year that you are supposed to cut off. Crape myrtles are supposed to be trees, but all over post they look like bushes, because no one ever cuts them back. I am not afraid to cut them back, so I took my trusty clippers to them and went to work. Each tree had so much crape growing up from the bottom, and so much crap and dead leaves trapped in it, I was afraid some sort of woodland creature was going to jump out and attack me for disturbing its home. Once I had them trimmed and raked out, they looked rather tree like. Hopefully they will still flower.

The saddest foliage in our neighborhood is not in our yard. Once spring had finally sprung, I could see that lots of the houses around here have azaleas, the prettiest bush in all the land. However, many of the people who are lucky enough to have azaleas must not have realized what they were, because they have been trimmed into hedge shapes (I blame the Army for this, because unlike me, a topiary hater, they seem to be opposed to natural looking plant life). There is nothing sadder than a box shaped azalea.

When you move into an Army house, you never know what is going to come up in the springtime. Twice we have been happily surprised when daffodils, hyacinths, and irises emerged from our flower beds in the spring, planted by some thoughtful person who didn’t mind that they would be moving before the flowers came up. Just as often, I’m sure, people find themselves with bushy trees or stumpy “bushes” on their hands. I will do my best to keep the “gardens” in order while we’re here, but when we’re gone, it could be months before some one else moves in. The “bushes” may be overgrown by then, and some one new will have to discover a way to compensate for the actions of the garden slasher.

Me and The Washington Post

2006-05-01T09:54:00.000-04:00

Look at me, ahead of my time. Maybe I could get a job in The Washington Post editorial room.

I Love A Parade

2006-04-28T23:20:00.000-04:00

When we arrived at preschool, 10 minutes late as always, it was immediately apparent that we should have been on time. I knew that the Child Development Center was having a parade today as a grand finale to the celebration of the Month of the Military Child (that is, kids whose parents are in the military, not kids that are obsessed with wearing camouflage and shooting guns). What I didn’t know was that the parade was starting right at 9:00. I was told that Lauren should wear a yellow shirt today, but no one told me that the parade was starting so early, that parents were marching too, or that it involved leaving the center grounds and parading with an actual marching band.

As I pulled into the parking lot, the members of the Army Band were unloading from their bus and all of the kids from the center were lined up and ready to march. There was nowhere to park, and as I tried to pull through the parking lot to park on the street, the day care center head walked toward me shaking her head saying “Please stop your car,” in a measured quiet voice that one normally reserves for the very young or the mentally challenged. I put the brakes on the car and my spontaneously combusting rage and said “I’m just trying to get out of the way. Where can I put the car? Can I leave it here?” Here being along the yellow fire zone curb. I could see she was dying to tell me no, but she gave a long look and then a long sigh, and then said “I guess you can leave it here for now.”

I was tempted to give a look of my own, but ever mindful of the impressionable young souls around me, I parked and got the kids out of the car. I figured I would be stuck for about 5 minutes until the parade got underway and then be released to my zealously guarded 4.5 hours of freedom that I get every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Unfortunately, I was wrong. As I started to lead Lauren over to stand with her preschool class, she began to cry and wriggle and inform me that “No, NO, NOOO! I don’t want to be in the parade!” I tried to be understanding for a minute, since she was probably as surprised as I was to find the parade about to begin the moment she arrived at school. But then she said something that reignited my fuse: “I’m afraid of the band!”

My children love music more than any other children I have ever encountered They will sing songs that they learn at school, songs that they learn on the radio or CDs in the car, songs from TV and TV commercials, songs they’ve heard at church, and songs that they make up themselves. They were absolutely obsessed with the Sound of Music for almost a year, until we brought home Mary Poppins, which has held on as a favorite for more than a year already. I think Marty learned to speak for the sole purpose of requesting repeated viewings of the Sesame Street “Peter and the Wolf” DVD. The kiddies insisted on hearing the Irish Tenors every time we rode in the car until Christmas time, when they learned every song on the Muppets Christmas CD, and only agreed to remove it from the car in February when I bought the Curious George CD (which they have also learned completely). Sometimes for fun I’ll introduce them to one of my old CDs, and then listen with amusement as they sing along to Erasure or REM using their own lyrics. Marty drags his wooden xylophone around with him everywhere, sometimes to play nicely and sometimes to just bang on and yell like a budding young Dave Grohl. Aislinn has a guitar that she carries around and sings with, and sometimes just strums absentmindedly while she’s watching TV. I’m not claiming them to be musical prodigies; they are just absolute music nuts.

But most of the time the kids don’t sing songs, they sing stuff that normal people would speak. My life is not a soap opera, it is a regular opera, everything is sung at all times. Unless they are exhausted or crying, if I ask them what they would like for lunch, what they would like to read, what they would like to do, they answer me in song. The styles that inspire their tunes range from Gregorian Chant, to Broadway musicals, to atonal new age music. I was always embarrassed to sing when I was a kid, so to make sure that they don’t become self-conscious, I never comment on the fact that everything they do is set to music. Sometimes they sound great and sometimes they sound like a cartoon, but they always sing everything with great enthusiasm. The girls have a certain high pitched, Mary Poppins-inspired style that they use when they are doing what they call “beautiful singing.” They have a down-home, Kentucky raised, hillbilly style that they use for country singing. But generally they just sing in their regular voices and they can all carry a tune, so to a mom, they sound quite nice indeed.

And it’s not just the singing, they are nonstop dancers too. Right after Marty turned two he invented the Slow/Rock-It game where he directs us to sing a “slow” song so he can do ballet until he screams “Rock It” indicating we are to sing a fast song so he can rock out. Lauren has an outfit (that she wears inside the house about four days a week) consisting of pink ankle socks, pink shorts, and a pink t-shirt which is her gymnastics/ballet girl outfit. Whenever she’s got the outfit on, she prances around on tiptoe, acting very graceful and performing her version of ballet while she plays, eats, watches TV, whatever. When Aislinn receives a new pair of shoes with hard soles, she can hardly keep from trotting out her version of tap dancing on the parquet floor. If I had any aspirations to be a stage mom, I probably could have enrolled them in some sort of Broadway boot camp for children, like the sports camps that the kids from the Soviet Union were sent to at age 3 to become great gymnasts. Only rather than pine away for their childhoods, my kids would probably love it.

So there I was at the day care center this morning, absolutely flabbergasted with my little soloist who claimed to be afraid of the band. We have seen the Army band perform on many occasions and they have never provoked a fight or flight response in Lauren. In my annoyance I concluded that she was just being difficult, but I didn’t make her march. I went into the center to sign the kids in, and discovered that Marty’s class was off marching too, so we went outside to sit on the curb and wait for the parade to return. It was a beautiful day, and I knew that a parade composed of children 5 and under was unlikely to be gone for long, so I decided to just enjoy the weather and the time with the kids who, of course by this point, were dancing around on the grass. I wasn’t annoyed anymore, but I had to know, so I kept pestering Lauren with questions (in a persistent manner that I learned from her actually):

“Why are you afraid of the band?”

“Don’t you remember how much we liked the band at the Christmas tree lighting?”

“Didn’t you see how much fun the kids were having marching behind the band?”

“Don’t you remember that parade on Clifford where Jetta marched with the band?”

“Do you think it is too loud?”

“Did you think they would walk too fast?”

She was evasive, and finally admitted that she wasn’t afraid of the band. I knew it! So I asked, “What was the problem then, why wouldn’t you march with your class?”

“I don’t like the clown.”

The clown! Now there is a childhood phobia I can get behind. I certainly would not have forced Lauren to march off after a clown, even a harmless clown at a Month of the Military Child parade. We sat in the sun, safely out of clown range, and listened to the drums as the parade circled the block. When the band came back into view they began to play again, and Marty got up to dance. The band eventually assembled in front of the center to give a little concert, and I took the kids over to sit with their classes. The clown wandered off with some of the teachers and left the kids in peace to enjoy the show. I gave them each a little hug and kiss and headed off, 45 minutes later than normal, but happy that we would not have to avoid the Army band for the rest of our time here.

Since We're Together, We Might As Well Say, Would You Be Mine, Could You Be Mine, Won't You Be My Neighbor?

2006-04-27T22:33:00.000-04:00

I have had close friends, casual friends, work friends, childhood friends, boyfriends, and army friends, and in every case I was able to negotiate the ups and downs of the relationships because friendship is easy to figure out. The relationship that I find rather tricky is the one between me and my neighbors. I suppose there are neighborhoods like the ones you see on TV, where everybody is always running in the kitchen door of everybody else, but in my reality, the neighborhood always includes a rather large contingent of crazy people. You can pick your nose, you can pick your neighborhood, but rarely can you pick your neighbors – they just come with the house.

In every apartment building I have ever lived in (and I have never truly lived in a sketchy neighborhood), I have been awakened at night by odd wailing or screaming, banging and bumping. Every house I have ever occupied has come with some weird guy down the street who mows the lawn wearing a purple satin robe and a miner’s helmet or a reclusive woman who leaves letters for the mailman addressed to various news anchors with the notation “More Chapters” on the envelope. The crazy people are easy to identify and avoid (or interact with if you like crazy), but the other “regular” people take a while to figure out. And when you figure out that there are some you don’t like or can’t get along with or don’t understand, what can you do? They are going to be right next door or down the street or around the corner until one of you moves away. However, when you are lucky, you find someone who is neighborly, willing to help you out, to lend eggs and sugar, or to just spend some time chatting.

I learned a valuable lesson in my apartment in Ardmore, which was in a building of single units – everyone lived alone. I befriended a seemingly normal girl who lived on the top floor of my stairwell, and occasionally we would go out and have a beer or sometimes she would knock on my door after work and just come in for a while to tell me about her day. She was not exactly a friend I would have sought out, but she seemed harmless enough. Unfortunately, I was wrong. She began to stalk me, knocking on my door every time she went by it, and on the occasions when I would answer it, she would come in looking to be fed and regale me yet again with the tales of her terrible job. Eventually I would come home from work, change and head out for a walk so that I would not be home when she got home. When my walk was over, I would check the area near the building for her car, and if I saw it, I would scoot along the side of the building so that she couldn’t see me out the window. I would creep as quietly as I could up the stairs and into my apartment, where immediately I would turn on the TV and the water so that I could claim that I had not heard any knocks. If she did manage to spot me, I would immediately pick up the phone and explain that it was a long, lost relative, so I really needed to be alone. She was holding me hostage in my apartment because we had stepped past neighborly in an attempt at friendship, and when it didn't work out, I had nowhere to run. All I wanted in the world was for her to move away because I loved my apartment, but in the end she outlasted me and I got married and moved away.

When the HP and I first moved into a house, I found myself completely unprepared for the etiquette of dealing with neighbors because my parents rarely dealt with theirs (probably because before I was aware of what was going on, they had met them and found them to be crazy). Fate forced us to meet our first next door neighbors however, when the water line from the main to our house broke when we were away for the weekend. We came home late on a Sunday, two month old baby in tow, to a house with no water. Fortunately the water line break was a well-known problem in the neighborhood (apparently built by a shady contractor using substandard pipes). Everybody knew that you could run a hose from a neighbor’s house into the outlet for your own hose, and pressurize your house with their water until the pipes were repaired. We didn’t know our neighbors, but they seemed friendly enough, so we knocked on their door and they immediately agreed to help us out. From that encounter we would occasionally chat about how long the landlady was taking to fix the problem, and sometimes we’d stay and the kids would play. Eventually, the wife became our daughter’s part time day care provider, and we became friendly, inviting each other to parties, sharing stories about the kids, and watching each other’s houses during vacations. However, two years later when it was time for us to move, none of us really knew what to do. They were very close to our daughter and had helped us out a lot, so we all went out for a farewell dinner and promised to keep in touch. During my first few trips home from Kentucky I would stop by and see them and the kids would play, but eventually it seemed strange to keep going there. We didn’t have a friendship in place, we were neighborly, and neighborly just doesn’t seem to last “across the miles and over the years.”

When we got to Kentucky, I did not find anyone particularly neighborly, and our next door neighbor actually turned and ran inside one afternoon when she saw me coming back from the playground with my daughter. On one side were an older couple with no kids (and no interest in kids) and next to them was a crazy who invited me in one day to see how she had covered all of her linoleum tile with shelf paper. I spent a lot of time alone there, eventually making a few friends from other parts of post. But over time the neighbors began to change, and for the most part each addition to the block was an improvement over the people who had left. The crazy moved out and a couple with a daughter moved in. I saw them outside having a beer the night before I left for a trip back east and as I was leaving I begged my husband “Please go befriend them before the crazies get them.” More nice people moved in, more crazy people moved out, and by the time we were set to move again, we lived on a great friendly block. All the moms could hang out together outside while the kids played, and after dark everyone went about their own business. We would lend things back and forth, watch each others kids on occasion, and attend each other’s parties, but we never started walking in each other’s kitchen doors. I really miss them, enough to make a real effort to keep in touch, because the Army may bring us back together again, and if we don't live right in each other's backyards, we might indeed have a chance to become good friends.

Companionship and favors are not the only advantages I have received from being neighborly. Often neighbors have stuff for their kids that you don’t plan to get for your kids. For example, I have no plans to ever purchase a trampoline, partly for all of the nagging parental worries that someone could get horribly injured, but mainly because I don’t like to buy things that are that big. I really don’t want to buy something like a trampoline or swingset, because once the kids tire of them (and they will probably sooner than later) you just have a big thing in the backyard, gathering pollen and leaves, killing the grass underneath, and generally obstructing the vista of the yard. Fortunately for us, we have always had neighbors with outdoor play equipment. Our current neighbors bought the trampoline for their daughter on her seventh birthday. I was hoping for 40 days of rain, so that I would not have to go outside and hear the nonstop pleas of the kids to jump on the trampoline. But the very first day that she invited our kids over to bounce with her, her mom stuck her head out the door and said the magic words “Billy and I wouldn’t mind if you put the little ones up on the trampoline when we’re at work and the other kids are at school.” Now I have all of the advantages of a trampoline without the dead grass, and I scored it with the goodwill I had amassed by being neighborly and occasionally getting their daughter from the school bus.

Here in Virginia, typically the first thing every neighbor tells me is how soon she will be moving away, as if to ward of any advances of friendship I might make. Many of the houses around me are empty, and so I find myself alone a lot of the time, missing the convivial days back in Kentucky. At least I have the memories of Kentucky and the hope that one by one the houses around me may fill up with people who aren’t afraid to be neighborly.

Updates

2006-04-25T21:26:00.000-04:00

The following post includes stuff that relates to previous posts. I imagine some day I could rework the essays and add this stuff, remove other stuff, and then what? I suppose I could print all of them off and carry them around in a big binder like those guys who handicap horse races at the track. I can spend my AARP days harassing people and saying "Lookee here, I did something other than watch TV while my husband was deployed."

Bad Mommy and Knock Knock

Tonight I went out for a fundraising dinner to the closest all-you-can-eat pizza buffet. Accompanying me were three absolutely angelic, perfectly behaved, wonders to behold named Aislinn, Lauren, and Marty. When I left them at the table repeatedly to collect pizza, drinks, napkins, straws, they sat quietly in their chairs, talking to each other and eating their dinners. No one got up from their chair. No one cried. No one spoke loudly. No one stared at the people at the next table. The three of them displayed table manners of well-heeled society people, with “pleases”, “thank yous” and smiles to everyone around them. I just sat in my seat and marveled at them, wondering what alignment of the planets had brought this situation before me. When we were ready to leave, they all got up and headed for the door. No one whined for more dessert. No one asked for quarters for the gumball machines. All of them waved to the people that we knew and said quiet good-byes. As I buckled them into their car seats I could no longer contain myself. I told them, “That was, by far, the best behavior I have ever seen by any kids in any restaurant in my whole life. You all made me so happy and so proud of you. I can’t wait to tell Daddy what a great job you did. You guys were awesome.” Both girls blushed and smiled and then Aislinn, having just consumed a large brownie but nevertheless ever the opportunist, asked “Does that mean we can have two treats tonight?” Oblivious, Marty sat in his seat and barked along to the Curious George soundtrack during my little speech of appreciation, but hopefully the sight of happy mommy registered in his little brain.

Flockin’ Robins

While in Cape May to visit my in-laws over Spring Break, an odd little robin kept flying from the birdfeeder outside to the kitchen windowsill. The kids enjoyed the chance to see the bird up close, but eventually it appeared that he was looking for a way in, and his repeated trips to the windowsill were a campaign to find some sort of weakness in the window that was keeping him outside. Later in the week the New York Times had a whole article about how Cape May was hallowed ground for serious bird watchers, where all sorts of people flocked to witness the great variety of birds that migrated through that area. In the 10 years I have been visiting Cape May, I had no inkling of its reputation as a birder’s paradise. The only remarkable birds that I remember in Cape May (other than the would-be robin intruder) were a little wren of some sort that got trapped in my in-laws’ fireplace and a pack of overly aggressive ducks that chased my husband, his dad, and our poor little daughter back to shelter of the car moments before they were tackled and quacked to death for a few bits of stale bread. I’m sure the main reason I never noticed the birds is that my in-laws, whose back yard is decorated with several bird feeders, never put birdseed out because they don’t want bird poop all around the yard. In these days of bird flu uncertainty, that is probably a very wise decision.

Life on the Homefront

I managed to get the week wacker going and attempted to trim some weeds around the curbs and trees and flower beds and lampposts in the yard. While I will give myself an A- for my use of the mower and a C+ for my use of the leaf blower, I am afraid I must give myself a D for the weed wacker, and that is only because I am giving myself credit for assembling it and getting it started without injuring myself. I had sunglasses on for eye protection, and it was a good thing to because there was all sorts of crap flying around, which I don’t remember noticing at the times when I have been sipping margaritas and watching the neighbors tend their yards. My results with the weed wacker fell into two categories: the parts of the yard with weeds that just wouldn’t be wacked, and the parts of the yard that I scalped to the bare soil. When I got inside I discovered my pants were covered with pulverized bits of rock, soil, and weeds and that entering the house I had made a huge mess of the kitchen floor reminiscent of the days when my husband came in from a bout of yard work. Following my description of my weed wacking experience, the HP urged me to hire a yard service with the separation pay we are receiving. I plan to hire one for the summer, but I hate to do it while I’m here because the service we had in Kentucky never came when we needed them, and I hate looking at a job that I could do but shouldn’t because we are paying somebody else to do it.

What’s In Your Closet?

The closet project has been completed, and anyone who would like to make an offer on 14 pairs of men’s pleated khakis and corduroys, sized 34 x 30, 8 large wool sweaters, 5 dress shirts, or 2 pairs of used boat shoes please let me know. I now have two beautiful closets, one neatly organized for the HP and Marty, and one neatly organized for me. All of our out of date, out of size, or out of luck clothes are piled up in a mountain waiting for removal to Goodwill or eBay, depending on my level of motivation when I next feel I have the energy to move those clothes around again. I have not conquered the HP’s dresser yet, and must confess that some things from the closet got shoved into the dresser when I couldn’t decide whether it should stay or go. The whole project was quite grueling, but not an emotional roller coaster as I had feared.

The kids have moved a framed photograph from my dresser to the computer desk. The frame has the word “FAMILY” etched at the bottom of it and the photo depicts the five of us sitting on the couch when Marty was a newborn. We are all smiling except Marty who is in the slumped in the classic “I can’t hold my big dome up one more minute” baby pose, but his eyes are open and he doesn’t look unhappy. Lauren explained that now when we miss daddy we can just look right here next to the computer and I have to agree that a picture of a happy family is preferable to the image of a messy closet when it comes to thinking about the ones you love.

Bad Mommy and Wanted: Baby Groomers

On the Saturday of “bad mommy” weekend, I managed to get the kids in and out of the bathtub and dressed in their jammies with a minimum of anxiety. They have to have a bath on Saturday, because if they take it on Sunday, then they need another one on Tuesday when they have CCD, and that just doesn’t work out for me. Unfortunately, on Sunday one of the neighbors came and asked the kids to come play outside. Normally I love to have them outside, but of course with the weekend I was having, they couldn’t just play on the playground or bounce on the neighbor’s trampoline.

The set of eight community swings, conveniently located directly behind my house, does not sit on a bed of mulch or a bed of grass, but within a small oasis of sand that was brought in and dumped sometime long before we moved here. For the most part, the kids ignore the sand and when I am forced to push Marty on the swings I always make sure I change out of flip flops into closed shoes so I don’t get that sand on my feet. I am always grossed out by sand that is not on a beach, even the sand from our old sandbox in Kentucky which was equipped with a lid. But this loose sand out there for all the wild animals to scratch and poop in, disgusts me. And just my luck, the neighbors had arrived with sand toys to play in this nasty sand, and all the kids jumped right in and dug with them. I could practically see the germs on them when it was time to go inside, so I sent them all to the bath tub, but could only gain their cooperation by promising not to wash their hair. Then on Monday, after they had spent hours in the sun jumping on the trampoline, I had to put them in the tub yet again to clean their grimy faces and sweaty hair. Talk about karma – three baths for three kids on each of three days – that will teach me to show a little self control the next time I am tempted to be a bad mommy.

Bad Mommy

2006-04-24T23:43:00.000-04:00

Life is hard when you are a bad, bad mommy. I try as hard as the next girl, but there are times, particularly in the past few months and more specifically last Friday, where I lose all concept of the age of my children and what I can expect of them. At those moments, a certain ghost from my childhood reappears, and is unleashed on my sweet unsuspecting kids with the force and fury of a hurricane that has been spinning and gathering strength unnoticed in the warm waters off Florida for 20 years. When I feel it coming I try to hold it back, to protect the weak and small, but these days the levies sometimes break. I’ll never hurt my kids, but I am sure the angry specter of their once reliably fun-loving and understanding mother startles and upsets them.

I spent my childhood making no attempt to control my horrible Irish temper. I wasn’t particularly violent or even mouthy, since I was too much of a runt. However, I imagine I spent a lot of time with a scowl on my face because everything pissed me off, particularly every member of my family, every other kid at my school, every figure of authority, every soccer referee, and every lame boring homework assignment. (Anyone who had ever encountered my father in the act of being especially disappointed by the behavior of one his children or the Washington Redskins, would have had an immediate clue as to where my tendencies came from. If my father had been born in an earlier time, when language was just developing, thunderstorms would likely have been named after him.) However, I guess that much rage finally burns itself out and when I started high school I got tired of being so mad. I was finally free of the school where I had spent nine years with all the same kids, years when I was unable to change because my place in the landscape was so well entrenched. I decided to reinvent myself as a calm person, and after four years of high school, my classmates bestowed on me what once would have been the unlikeliest of titles: Most Laid Back. Now, I must give my title back or find a way to earn it back.

In my throes of guilt over an incident Friday evening, I came to the realization that all of the things that the kids did to upset me that night were entirely caused by me. My sister and I joke that someday I should write a parenting book since I have been known to say things like “Sometimes you have to make them cry” and “no books tonight, watch TV or go to bed.” Here is some additional advice I would put in that book:

Never tell your kid you are taking them anywhere. That way they can’t nag you to find out when you are going or cry when you decide that you are not going to Target because there is a monsoon outside.

If you are dumb enough to tell them your plans in advance, never take more than one kid out with you to Target in the pouring rain.

If you are dumb enough to take more than one kid, let’s say you take three kids, to Target in the pouring rain, don’t buy a big square basket with a lid that requires one whole arm and hand to carry.

If you are dumb enough to buy a big square basket, don’t buy so much other stuff that you need both hands and your six year old to carry it all. This means you must put your four year old in charge of walking your two year old across the Target parking lot in the pouring rain.

Never inform your children that TicTacs are available to the general public. Everyone will be much happier if they only exist in Grandmom’s handbag (much as Froot Loops only exist in Grandmom’s cabinet).

Never buy a car that has operable locks in the back seat. This may seem like a challenging requirement, but decommissioned police cars will likely fit the bill.

If you follow all of these rules, the following incident will never happen to you: Due to our urgent need for a manual pencil sharpener, the movie Because of Winn Dixie, and some sort of basket to contain the kids books in the living room, we headed out to Target in the pouring rain. The kids were reasonably behaved in the store, although the two year old (Marty) kept pitching things out of the cart, and the four year old (Lauren) kept insisting on pushing the cart, and the six year old (Aislinn) declared as we were headed out the door that she had to go to the bathroom and couldn’t possibly wait until we got home. Since, like a moron, I had bought a big square basket with a lid that required one arm and hand to carry, I was really counting on momentum to get us out the door and off to the car, but trying to be understanding I let the two girls scurry into the bathroom by themselves while I waited with all of my wares and Marty. Marty put on quite a show, banging on the gift registry computers repeatedly asking “How do you get PBS kids on this ‘puter?” and then running in larger and larger circles around the entranceway. When the girls finally reemerged and we tried to go outside, Marty had to try every door as I said, “that door doesn’t open, come here buddy, that door doesn’t work.” When I finally managed to herd him out with my knee, we stopped under the awning to put everyone’s hood up, I picked up the big basket and all of the bags, handed my purse to Aislinn and began to direct everyone through the rain, down the sidewalk, toward the car. At this point, Aislinn asked “Mom, can I have a tic tac?”

Is that the sort of question that should make a mother turn and with a measured ominous voice say “Do not ask me that question again.”? Obviously it should not be, but that is what came out of me. When we stepped into the street I directed the Lauren to take Marty by the hand and hold onto him until we got to the car. The car was close, but Marty, unfazed by the weather and the car heading right toward us, began to pull away from his sister for a little bit of splashing. I grabbed him by the back of the raincoat, not roughly (although anyone looking at my face in that moment might have thought I was going to throw him down into the puddle) and hurried him along, not noticing that the bags I had slung over my arm were banging his little back with every step. We reached the car and I loaded them all in and closed the door while I deposited all the purchases in the back. When I went to open the door and buckle the car seats, the door wouldn’t open because Lauren had locked it from the inside as a joke. If the face I’d made trudging through the rain was bad, I can only imagine how frightening the one staring through the locked door at little Lauren was. She immediately began to cry, telling me she was sorry, but instead of accepting the apology as I require all the kids to do, I said “I have told you already that that is not funny, and you can’t say your sorry and then keep doing it over and over again.” When the red finally began to fade from in front of my eyes and the crying began to reach a rather desperate pitch, I finally said, “That’s okay Lauren. Here, take these tic tacs and pass them out to every one.”

“How many can we have?”

“You can each have two.”

“How about three?”

“Okay you can each have three.”

“Can we each have four?”

“Mommy needs a drink.”

When I put the kids to bed, I had a quiet evening to reflect on my bad behavior, and decided that unless I wanted to be cast aside when Daddy gets home from Afghanistan, I’d better put in some time as the good mommy. So on Saturday, when the buddy boy finally went down for his nap and the girls were still finishing their after lunch treats and distractedly watching TV, I remembered that Lauren had asked if she could decorate a box as a house. Hoping for a hero moment, I quietly made my way over to the pile of boxes in the entryway (we keep a large pile of boxes on hand so that we always have the size we need for whatever we are sending to Afghanistan) and found two that seemed to be manageable in size and more or less house shaped. I began pulling the address labels and other stickers off, but the girls heard me and soon from the living room came the inevitable question “Mom, can we decorate some boxes to look like houses?” Seeking some redemption, I said “I’m way ahead of you girls, I’m getting the boxes ready now. Why don’t you go find the big bag of markers?”

“We want to paint the boxes.”

“Paint the boxes?”

“Yes, with paints and paintbrushes.”

“The only paints that we would have that would cover these boxes are those smelly ones. (tempera) Are you sure you want to use them?”

In a scene that would have made Walt Disney proud, the girls looked at one another, then at me and with huge grins on their faces, nodded yes. What could I do? I was the bad mommy, so I said “Okay” as cheerfully as I could and went to find some newspaper to spread on the ground. I got the paints down from their high closet shelf, made each girl a palette on a paper plate, found brushes, and got them each a big cup of water for rinsing their brushes. I watched them get started and admired their artistry for a few minutes and then inched away to the living room where my la-z-boy and huge book awaited me. I figured that we would all have a little quiet time and then we would be refreshed and ready to spend the rest of the day in harmony. I was seated and reading for about 3 minutes when the question barrage began.

“Mommy, want to see what I did?”

“Mommy, is this a good color for the chimney?”

“Mommy, when we finish painting these boxes can we paint another one to be a library?”

“Mommy, can I have some more yellow paint?”

“Mommy, if you are committed to an insane asylum, who will take care of us while Daddy is in Afghanistan?”

Requiescat (et Vivet) in Pacem

2006-04-22T22:24:00.000-04:00

In my alumi magazine that came today, there was a sad obituary for a woman from the class of 2000 who had died in January. The last sentence in the article indicated that her 22 month old daughter had died the same day. The list of grieving relatives did not include her husband, so I decided to look online and see if I could find out what happened. It turned out that she and her baby were the wife and child that were killed by a crazy British man who then fled back to England. After I read the first article about it, the whole story came back to me, and I remembered how crazy it was. I remembered it mostly because whenever I see a story like that, I always spend a few horrible minutes imagining what it must have been like for a mother to be there when her child was killed. This guy’s exploits have been grist for Nancy Grace and Greta van whatever and so I will not go into the details here. Still, once I found out she had gone to my college, I suddenly felt as if I knew her a little bit, or at least had probably known someone just like her when I was at school.

Unfortunately, she was not the first person from my college to be murdered since I graduated. I think 9 alums were killed on September 11, including a woman from my class that I did not know and a guy the year behind me who I knew and had shared beers with, although we were not in touch after college. A drop-out from my class was killed by a drug dealer in Florida, which was quite shocking (although it probably shouldn’t have been) considering I went to a small Catholic college. The worst thing that happened to someone that I met in college involved a guy named Nelson who was a year ahead of me that I had met when I was a freshman. I didn’t really know him, and after my first year I never spent any time with him again. He graduated, and then at his own graduation party he was stabbed to death by a childhood friend who had just had some sort of psychic break and murdered his own mother. I received this news when I got back to campus for my senior year, but I was not really able to wrap my head around this sort of information at the time, because I only knew a few people who had died at that point, and all of them had been sick.

Unfortunately having a spouse deployed gives you lots of time to think about people dying and all of the different ways it could happen. My husband always gives me a cleaned up version of what’s happening in Afghanistan, but the night that he spent hours in a bunker after a rocket attack on the US Embassy, he asked me what I had heard or seen about it. I don’t see much news, mainly because I don’t want the kids to see anything that will upset them, so I searched the Washington Post after I hung up. The “massive explosion” from the “rocket attack” merited three lines in the Post. Unfortunately for my husband and everyone else in the bunkers over there, Tom Cruise had a baby that day, so the column inches were needed for news that people really wanted to hear.

In addition to having a husband deployed, we know many other people - some friends, some acquaintances - that are also deployed or soon to deploy. I don’t like to think about the day to day danger they all face because it is too paralyzing. I like to pretend we’ve got everything under control and the bad guys on the run, much as the president would like me to, but every now and then I get a little wake up call that things aren’t going as well as we’d all like. Yesterday I got an e-mail from a friend I made in Kentucky, informing everyone that her husband’s humvee had been hit by an IED. He survived with a concussion, but two others he was with were killed and a third had head injuries. When I went online to find out if this accident had been reported, I found an article about one of the guys who had been killed, Spc. Scott M. Bandhold. He had worked at Disney World and on cruise ships as an entertainer, and at a casino in Portugal. He was inspired to enlist after September 11, when he was 34, so he was a little older than most of the soldiers over there, but I am sure his experience was the same.

I’m sure the moment of death for anyone in a trauma is surreal, but lately I seem to be thinking about it all the time. I think watching that movie Grizzly Man was what kicked off these latest ponderings for me. Actually, I could only watch parts of it since the Grizzly Man made me cringe so much because he seemed so out of touch with reality. The movie is a documentary about a guy who goes to live with the bears and seems to think they love him. At the end of the movie he and his girlfriend get eaten by a bear, and I immediately began to think how in the midst of the horror of undergoing such a violent and ghastly death, he must have had a moment where it all seemed too crazy to be true. He had been an aspiring actor living in Hollywood and supposedly almost getting the role of Woody on Cheers, and here he was being eaten by a bear.

All of the westerners who have been taken hostage in Iraq must have similar moments. The one I puzzle over most was Nick Berg, a guy from Pennsylvania who was 26 and went to Iraq as businessman looking for work. He hadn’t spent much time in the Middle East, and I imagine him to be a Philly guy similar to my husband and his friends. Added to the shock and terror of being murdered must have been some measure of bewilderment that he was in a place so far from what he knew, being subjected to a death that most of us imagine we will only see in movies like Braveheart or Gladiator.

One summer when I was buying sunscreen at the Happy Harry’s pharmacy near my parents’ house, I saw a newspaper article taped to the counter next to a donation jar. The donations were needed for the family of two women who were crushed when a dump truck was trying to make a sharp turn and tipped over onto their car, crushing them. The accident took place outside Bootsie’s Barbecue, a place down the street from my parents where we bought dinner a couple times every summer. I had never heard of the accident, and neither had my parents, but it seemed especially sad to me, because they probably never saw it coming. The roof probably started caving in on them and before they could figure out what was happening they were gone. This seemed like a freak accident to me, until a few weeks ago when I was driving with my kids to my sister’s house. We were headed through the center of bustling Pittsville, Maryland, and I was a little distracted by the sign that my sister and her husband had hung on the building where they will soon be opening a new restaurant. When my eyes returned to the road, I saw a dump truck careening toward me up on two wheels. I swung my car way out to the right, certain that some part of the truck or whatever was inside it was about to come bouncing through my windshield or down onto my roof. Fortunately, somehow the truck managed to right itself and sped away, leaving me a shivering mess on the side of the road. Unlike so many people, I had actually had a chance to consider this manner of death, since I had read about the other two women. But that didn’t make the moments of uncertainty any less traumatic or make me any more prepared for what could have happened.

Spc. Bandhold was a guy who a few years ago was working at a casino in Portugal and going home every night to his wife and kids, and suddenly he was a guy facing explosion in the desert. Every other soldier there must have a similar story, and be living a life that he/she couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. Even as I sit in the safety of our home, the potential disasters, diseases, and attackers are lurking out there. I wish we could all be like the guy in the movie Big Fish, and declare “This is not how I go” to stop the unthinkable from happening. However, I guess the only thing I can do now is ignore the potential for death and go on with life. And I will take some comfort in the fact that the odds are pretty good now that a dump truck will not come close to tipping over on me again.

(My apologies to Sister Petra if the Latin is wrong.)

Internet Connections

2006-04-20T21:56:00.000-04:00

When we moved to Kentucky we met a nice couple across the street with two cute, all-American looking kids. As is often the case with Army neighborhoods, since the ages of our kids did not match – mine were little, hers were in school – and since they were often away for the weekend visiting their extended families, we would wave to one another, but we never really tried to become friends. I knew my daughter would love to get to know them better since they had a huge wooden play structure in the backyard, but she had to settle for the playground down the street where we could come and go as we pleased without worrying about bigger kids stepping on her. The husband half of the couple worked in the same office as my husband, so occasionally we would hear news about them or their kids, things that were especially good or especially bad, but usually unless we drove by and waved, I didn’t really think about them.

One day the HP came home from work and said our neighbor across the street was going to be sent to Kuwait for a year, much as the HP has now been sent overseas for a year. I felt bad for the wife, bad for the kids, but I knew their families were nearby and at the time, pre-9/11, we didn’t really think there was must danger involved. As it turns out, we were wrong, but the danger was not in Kuwait, it was at home. While the neighbor husband was gone, I was pregnant with my son and I would wander the house at all hours, unable to sleep because I had developed a debilitating allergy to the state of Kentucky. I would often stand at the kitchen sink and stare out the window to see if any one else in the neighborhood was up or had a light on, if anyone else was stressed out or unable to breathe like me. More often than not, when I looked toward the neighbor’s house across the street, I would see the familiar glow of the blue TV screen. I would think how sad and lonely she must be, how she must have trouble sleeping while her husband is away just like I do.

How naïve I was. When her husband returned home from Kuwait, there was a great flurry of activity with moving trucks and relatives and other people coming and going. My husband finally ran into the neighbor husband and asked him if he was moving or had been reassigned. That was when the neighbor informed us that the day he arrived home from Kuwait his wife had taken the kids and left him for someone she met online while he was away. He had no inkling that any of this was going on, and like him I also felt completely duped. Here I was wasting my pumped up, hair trigger, pregnancy sympathy on her, thinking she was groggily watching Happy Days reruns to pass the time, and really she was looking for love online. The blue screen that glowed through their window at all hours was not the TV at all, but the computer. I still find it hard to fathom that sort of betrayal (of her husband that is, after I had the baby and came down off the hormones I realized that she wasn’t really trying to hurt my feelings). Forget the fact that meeting people online can be rather sketchy, particularly if you have small children, but if you are married to someone and so unhappy that you want to leave him or her, I think the polite thing to do would be to mention it before the moving van rolls up to the door.

And yet, now that my husband is away, here I sit at the computer night after night, writing these little essays and sometimes reading other people’s blogs (depending on how late it gets while I’m trying to push myself to 1500). We have plenty of neighbors, some of them pregnant, who may look out their windows and see the blue glow of this screen through the cracks in my mini-blinds. Are they more suspicious than I was, or would they just think it was the TV the way I did?

I would never be one for sitting in on a chat room since it takes me a long time to compose my thoughts and since the whole idea of chat rooms sort of creeps me out. Obviously I am not sitting here looking for love, but I suppose I am sitting here seeking a connection, even if it is just to an imaginary audience. I envision that someone will read a sentence in something I’ve written and think “that’s pretty funny” or “that’s pretty pathetic.” I don’t really care what the reaction is; I just like to think that I am causing one

Earlier this year I read the book Gilead which I would describe as a great book, but since it won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award last year, that seems a bit unnecessary. Unfortunately, I gave my copy of it to my mother, so I can’t quote it exactly (which might be an argument for putting off this little dissertation until I get it back, but I’ll just fix it later), but it is a story of an older minister who is dying, and the book is basically a long letter that he is writing to his young son. I won’t go into the plot details here, although I may write a book report on it someday, but at one point the narrator says something along the lines of: when you are writing you are never alone, because your reader is always there with you. I feel that way to. I know when I write these things I am talking to someone out there, and that makes me feel connected even though the reader might be someone I’ll never meet. In a way, that is a perfect situation for me. I’ve got friends and family all over the place that check in with me regularly to make sure everything is going well here on the homefront. I’m glad to talk to all of them, but since I spend all of my time in a house with 3 small kids, I am not exactly full of captivating anecdotes of my fascinating life. My conversations with my sisters usually go on for a while and then end with the phrase “I’ve got nothing,” nothing new to report, nothing interesting to say, nothing more to add. I can’t exactly trap the well wishers on the phone and give them the story of every street I’ve ever lived on, but I can put it out here.

Reading other people’s blogs is more confusing to me. I don’t know if I should be checking back a couple times a week to read what is going on in the lives of people I don’t know. I am always looking for something to read since I have all of this time on my hands in the evenings (I usually blow through my magazines the day they arrive) so when I find a blog of someone who is interesting and funny (even when he or she is ranting), I find myself eagerly waiting for more. But more often I find myself adding blogs to my list of favorites only to later delete them when the blogger turns out to be more egomaniacal, offensive, pathetic, depressing, or boring than I had initially thought. I feel a little bit like I am turning my back on them, since I had become one of their listeners, one of the people that they were talking to when they wrote. But really, other people are not writing for me, they are writing for any readers that are out there and I’m sure there are plenty who don’t react the way I do. I have not set out to deliberately bore people, and hope that readers will move on when they find I am irritating them.

Given this discussion about my own motivations for going online, I guess I shouldn’t jump to conclusions about my neighbor in Kentucky. Maybe she was just trying to find a friend online, and maybe she would have left her husband with or without a boyfriend waiting in the wings. Maybe her husband was a big psycho, we really didn’t know them. Maybe if she hadn’t found someone to talk to online she would have felt trapped in her life and gone crazy. Probably she was just an immature loser with time on her hands who found the attention from strangers exciting. She is a perfect case study for the argument that, for better or for worse, the internet is the place you can always find someone to relate to, whether you are the most bizarre sort of pervert or just a lonely woman at the keyboard with nothing else to do.

Life on the Homefront - What A Great Day for a Mow

2006-04-19T23:27:00.000-04:00

When the HP departed for Afghanistan, he left behind the three chores that have been his sole responsibility since we were married – taking out the trash, cleaning the fish tank, and taking care of the yard. Obviously, when he was away on a trip or late coming home, I would occasionally put out the trash, and although I have never cleaned our fish tank, I vaguely remember helping my brother with it once or twice when I was younger. But the one thing I have never done is operate lawn keeping equipment. I know some women LOVE to mow the lawn for the exercise, but I don’t need exercise that badly. What I do need is to have one aspect of keeping house that is not my responsibility, that the HP wouldn’t dare ask me to do, that I can ignore even when it looks terrible, because it is not my problem. I am fairly mechanically inclined and I am not afraid of machinery, but I have remained willfully ignorant when it comes to landscaping accoutrement. I will rake leaves, I will shovel snow, I will even weed the garden, but I will not under any circumstances mow the lawn, until now.

When we were kids, my parents held an unwaveringly sexist view of dividing the household chores. The girls had to set and clear the table, do the dishes, vacuum, sort laundry, and basically undergo the sort of training that a 1930s housewife might have found useful. My brothers were responsible for two things: the lawn and the trash. My parents would probably have let me mow the lawn if I had insisted, but that would not have meant that my brothers would take over the dishes for a week. I would merely have been adding to my list of chores and subtracting from my brothers’. (Let me note here that my parents were not the sort of people against educating girls or who planned to keep us under lock and key until they arranged a suitable marriage. Apparently their plan was more along the lines of producing independent and well-educated career women who made excellent housewives as well.) Although Mrs. Neary, the widow next door to my parents, mowed her own miniscule lawn with one of those manual mowers with the rotating blade (and I can still hear the sound of that blade spinning), no other women in the neighborhood ever mowed grass, especially my mother. I know this because I have a distinct memory of one of my father’s extended business trips during what must have been a very rainy season in Washington, when my brothers were too young to operate the mower. The grass in our yard got so long that my best friend Kerry and I could pretend we were the girls from Little House on the Prairie, reenacting the famous opening scene where they run in slow motion through the field of tall grass.

When the HP and I were first married, we lived in an apartment with no landscaping responsibilities. Later we moved to a townhouse which had a lawn about as big as a dining room table, and although I probably could have groomed it with a pair of safety scissors, I took my stand and turned the “lawn” over to the man of the house. He bought the cheapest mower on the market – one step up from the mower Mrs. Neary had. About every month or so he would spend 15 minutes mowing the grass, usually not even bothering with the backyard since no one could see it and we never went out there. He had it pretty good until we moved to Kentucky, where our lawn was so huge we could have kept a family of cows grazing indefinitely. We were the only house on our end of the block, and everything as far as the eye could see was our responsibility to maintain. Clearly, the mower from the townhouse was not built to control such a lawn, but the HP resisted replacing it with the lame argument that we might next move back to a place with a little lawn. I let this go for a while, but soon mowing the grass became a 3 to 4 hour chore, and I would find myself stuck with the kids from the time the HP left for work until it was time for them to go to bed. Some super mommies may be able to handle this, but I can only take my kids until about 6:00 pm, and then I must get away from them (these days I turn on the TV, judge me if you must but at least I haven’t bundled them up and left them on the side of the highway). So in a valiant effort to reclaim some of my sanity, the HP finally went out and got a big self-propelled mower that cut the lawn maintenance time in half.

The HP regaled me with tales of the wonderful new mower, how easy it was to push, how fun cutting the grass was now. However, I had read Tom Sawyer and I saw right through his attempt to foist the lawn onto me. I cheerfully delivered cold drinks to him while he worked, and then I ran back to the safety of the air conditioning, but now I have nowhere to run. The HP had planned to give me a little lesson on all of the lawn equipment before he left, but it was never a priority since it was already almost winter. After he left though, I decided that I’d better learn how to use the leaf blower for three reasons. One, we have a car port (that’s right a car port) where leaves tend to collect, and while I could probably rake them out, no one really enjoys the sound of a metal rake repeatedly scraping concrete. Two, our housing area is overpopulated with pin oaks that drop teeny narrow leaves (the size of small feathers) that resist raking. Three, the wife of the commanding general here must have slipped on some leaves once, because now by order of the post command, every last little leaf must be hunted down and subdued into a clear plastic lawn and leaf bag.

At my request, the HP called and provided me with very clear detailed instructions on how to operate the leaf blower, and I was able to get it started without any problems. What he did not provide for me was a strategy for moving the leaves from their snug corner of the car port to the grass outside where I could get them into a bag. Imagine the scene if you will, when I fired up the blower, waded into a pile of leaves, and immediately turned the carport into my own personal snow globe. Leaves were swirling all around me and flying through the air, as I stood there like an idiot with the blower firing away. Of course I started to laugh which made my aim even worse and the cyclone of leaves even crazier, and I can only imagine what any random neighbor strolling by might have thought. Hoping to regain my composure, I took my machinery into the back yard where huge mounds of leaves had blown up against the back of the house. I managed to blow them along the house into an even bigger pile stuck behind a bush and the air conditioning unit. In a last attempt to salvage some use out of the stupid thing, I took it over to the little fenced drying yard (that’s right, I said drying yard) where more leaves had piled up, but after blowing them from a manageable pile into a strung out mess, I gave up, returned the blower to the shed and found my rusty rake.

I have only ventured into the shed since then to find holiday decorations or a cooler or to retrieve a tool from the HP’s tool coffin. However, when I returned home from spring break this week, the lawn had taken on a life of its own and if not for the kids’ bikes in the car port, the neighbors might have thought our house was abandoned. As a kid, I never understood why my dad thought clover and violets and buttercups in the lawn were such a bad thing – after all, clover was still green and the flowers were pretty. Unfortunately, now I realize that they are in fact weeds that can get quite tall and shaggy when left to their own devices. The tallest weeds in the lawn were probably 18 inches high, although the most prevalent were some things with purple flowers and teeny little leaves that went around and around their stalk. I knew that unless a kid knocked on the door that evening and offered to do it, I was going to have to mow the lawn myself. So I emailed the HP and he called the next day with instructions for starting the mower. I was not intimidated about starting it, since I’d had such success with the leaf blower, but as soon as I pulled the mower out of the shed, I was in trouble. I couldn’t find the little button that I was supposed to push to prime the engine so that I could start it. I looked everywhere I thought it might be, but couldn’t find it, so I went to look for the manual, but I couldn’t find the manual, so I went online to look at the manual, but the online lawnmower manual said to look at the engine manual to find out how to operate the engine.

I suppose at this point a normal person might have sought out a neighbor for help, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I knew they would think I was an idiot, and even if I went and got my analytical chemistry notebook from college and showed them how I could diagram the optics of an infrared spectrometer, they would have to tell the other neighbors that I was a dumb girl who didn’t know how to start the mower. Instead I got a pencil and went out and copied down every name and number on the stinking engine, and then plugged it all into Google to see what came up. The picture of the Briggs and Stratton engine that came up had a bright red button on it, and next to the button in bright red rather stylized letters were the words “PUSH 3X TO PRIME.” I knew there was no such thing on our mower, but I went out to look again, and sure enough on the front of the mower engine were the bright red words and the bright red button. In my defense, I never considered looking on the front for the button to prime the engine, because the only thing I know that needs to be started from the front are those cars with the engine cranks that the Waltons used to drive around. Anyway, I pushed the button as directed, pulled back the safety on the handle, yanked the pull string, and nothing happened. I had pretty much reached the end of my rope with the mower, but I figured I would add gas to it, and try one more time. Unfortunately we have two red plastic fuel cans in our shed, one for the blower and one for the mower. I couldn’t see into them, so I thought maybe I’d give them a quick sniff and see which one smelled more like a gas station. Then I was afraid that the neighbors might think I was so distraught over the separation from my husband that I had taken up huffing. In the end I just picked the can that looked older (since the mower is older than the blower) and dumped it in. This time after I primed the engine and pulled the string, the stupid thing finally started.

Our side yard is comprised of 30% weeds, 40% dirt, and 30% rocks, sticks, and debris. When I ran the mower over it, I couldn’t tell where I had mowed and where I hadn’t because I was so distracted by the alarming sounds of debris pinging around down in the mower blades. I went up and down and side to side on the yard, and even attempted the incredible shrinking square technique that the HP favors, but I’m sure it was obvious that I had no idea what I was doing. Every time the noise of nongrass items inside the mower got loud, I would turn and go the other way. After a while I decided that it looked as good as it was ever going to, and moved on to the front yard. The front yard is comprised of 95% weeds and 5% debris. We also have trees, a lamp post, metal access plates, and other obstacles that make a straight mowing grid rather impossible to follow. However, the weeds were so high I was able to determine where I had mowed and where I hadn’t, and when I was done, I thought it looked pretty good. In fact, I probably mowed it with a thoroughness that no man in the neighborhood would have bothered with, since I didn’t want any man in the neighborhood scoffing at my lawn.

Our back yard is composed of 75% dirt and debris, 20% moss, and 5% little weed patches. The weed patches are not close to the house, but I can see them out the back windows, growing taller and waving to me. Clearly after my experience with the frightening sounds of the side yard, I will not be taking the mower back there to tame the little weeds. What the back yard needs is a weed wacker, and we just happen to have one. All I need to do is figure out how to detach the blower from its engine and exchange it for the weed wacker attachment. If I send a quick email to the HP, he will no doubt provide me with the detailed instructions I need to accomplish the switch. One of these days I will, and I’ll let you know how that goes. For now, however, I think I will just keep the blinds closed in the back windows and instead look out the front window at my well groomed lawn and the trees whose leaves are just beginning to sprout and are months away from falling.