May 10, 2008 | What do I do all day?

Okay, so, the box is too wide to get a very good picture of it, but I was busy little beaver today.

Left to right, I’ve now got rosemary, banana peppers, flat-leaf parsley, two kinds of thyme, lemon basil, regular basil, lemon verbena, chocolate mint, and regular mint. And a whole bunch of pine straw. This is what happens when you’ve had just basil and rosemary plants, but VISIONS of an herb garden for a long time and then you happen upon a plant sale. I recommend approaching someone who works there with a $10 bill and a helpless look. “What are you looking for?” she asked. “Um, some herbs?” I said. She took good care of me.

(Yes, I know that banana peppers are not herbs. They were lonely.)

I am slowly filling the deck up with plants in containers. The betting pool is now open: How long will it take me to kill everything? (For the record, the strawberries are not only still alive, they’re blooming. Maybe my black thumb has mixed some metaphors and turned over a new leaf?)

May 9, 2008 | Offspring: ecstasy and agony, It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

So yesterday we had this big end-of-season soccer thing for, I dunno, six hours? Three days? A LONG TIME, is what I’m saying. It was a SOCCER EXTRAVAGANZA! With extra soccer! And hotdogs! And staying out entirely too late on a school night.

And after you’ve played several billion hours of soccer (Monkey) and run around the fields with your BFF (Chickadee) and eaten your weight in potato chips (both of them), you are maybe a little tired, right? The kids sat in the back of the car, vibrating slightly from the large cups of lemonade they’d consumed (Countrytime Lemonade: Less Lemon Flavor, More Hunks of Sugar), but largely silent and spent after the evening of excitement.

Otto and I held hands (can I just tell you that one of my FAVORITE PARTS about being married is holding hands in the car? AM DORK) and chatted quietly about the week’s events. “I just wish the emails would die down,” I said to him. (more…)

May 8, 2008 | Offspring: ecstasy and agony

Last summer, when we moved here, the drought was severe and our little neighborhood pond mostly a half-hearted mud puddle. It smelled of baked earth and rotting plants and after a visit or two to sort of scope out the area, we didn’t go back again. Why would we? It was teeming with mosquitoes and not much else.

This spring, the kids have rediscovered the pond. Now there is no greater prize for them than being told they can pull on their rainboots and grab some cups and buckets and go out to the pond to “explore.” Exploring is serious business, you know. There are creatures to be captured (always just for temporary observation in the bucket, then freed later) and sounds to consider and—often—a pair of geese waddling around and watching intruders with curious but tolerant glances.

The pond is close enough that the kids can go out alone, and this often affords me precious uninterrupted work time. They head off, happily, and I turn back to the trappings of adulthood. (more…)

May 7, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Ottomatic For the People

Our pool is still a murky chasm of waste water.

Oh, I know it’s only been a couple of days. It could take up to a week, everything we read told us. Maybe two! I was prepared to be patient about it, except that I’d forgotten something sort of important.

I’m not a patient person. (Surprise!)

And it didn’t help that a family member who also has a pool sent out some pictures to demonstrate that their newly-opened pool was just as frightening as ours, but then they dumped in a gazillion gallons of liquid shock and just 24 hours later the water was fresh and clean and beautifully blue. Hmph. We prefer the old fashioned method of adding only enough chemicals to cause acute neurological damage each day, rather than emptying our bank accounts and all in one day making the water pretty but capable of instantly killing any renegade hippos who might wander by for a swim. (more…)

May 6, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Haven't been hit by lightning yet!

Contrary to what you might think about a woman who writes about her entire life on the internet, I’m a fairly private person.

STOP LAUGHING.

I know that seems a complete contradiction of terms and some of you are thinking that I’ve finally started drinking during the day, but REALLY, it’s true. There’s a reason I blog about the stuff I do from the relative anonymity provided behind the computer screen, and believe it or not, there’s plenty of stuff I don’t write about at all.

Yes, yes, I know. My uterus and subsequent lack thereof, talking to the kids about sex, tormenting my husband into marrying me, and the time I went to a job interview with my pants falling down all seem like things which I maybe should’ve kept to myself, but BESIDES THOSE THINGS, there are things I don’t address. (more…)

May 5, 2008 | What do I do all day?, Offspring: ecstasy and agony, Ottomatic For the People

Yesterday Otto got a wild hair—and by “wild hair” I of course mean that he set out to do EXACTLY what he’d been telling me for two months he was going to do, but I was just sort of hoping ignoring him and practicing denial might stave off the inevitable—and declared it an Outside Work day.

We have a couple of acres, here, and the best part about it is that most of it is WOODS. Woods are awesome, because they’re shady, and they present lots of opportunities for your children to go out and muck around and turn over logs and find gross bugs, but BEST OF ALL, woods do not require mowing, digging, pruning, or other maintenance. They just sort of stand there.

Unfortunately, we also have a rather large garden plot across the front of the house, and then that whole area inside the fence back around the pool, and both areas are not unlike Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. There could totally be bobcats hiding in there, is all I’m saying. (more…)

May 3, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Ottomatic For the People

Last night, I had my bi-annual dose of Being A Faculty Wife.

Because Otto is a nice guy and also because he likes to entertain and perhaps ESPECIALLY because his department will reimburse him a whopping $8 per warm body (woo! let’s buy the name-brand soda!), we hosted a barbecue for some of his students. I had my inauguration into this ritual last semester, and I have to say that at the time I found it quite amusing. Especially the part where the students who’d been around for the PREVIOUS gathering at his bachelor pad sat around saying things like, “Otto, dude, you have real furniture now! It’s nice,” and then another student followed up with, “But, wait. Otto, you have KIDS now? WHOA!”

So yesterday it was time to mix up onion dip and put out the deck chairs and open our home to a bunch of young people who all regard me as a possible side-effect hallucination of their final projects and hangovers. Because DUDE, Otto isn’t supposed to have a LIFE much less a WIFE. And yet here I am, providing snacks and sliced tomatoes to put on their hamburgers. WEIRD. (more…)

May 2, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience"

I have mentioned before that I generally have a single cup of coffee or tea in the morning, and maybe one diet coke in the afternoon. I like caffeine. Honestly, I’m ALL FOR caffeine, but I drink it rather sparingly. I am not a caffeine-all-the-time person, at all.

You also may recall that I am all about the bargain and, indeed, count my frugality and deal-sniffing abilities amongst my finest talents, so it’s very rare that I partake of “fancy” coffee because GOOD LORD, $4 for something I can make at home for a quarter? SERIOUSLY?

Nevertheless, it remains a truth of life that sometimes you simply must have A Fancy Beverage out and about, and I try to deal with that as best I can. (more…)

May 1, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Health is overrated

Every now and then one member of the family manages to visit a proclivity on the rest of us, and before you know it, we’re all loving or doing the same thing. Hey, I never used to be a HUGE fan of fish. I mean, I liked fish just fine. I cooked it occasionally. But it was never one of my big things.

Back when Monkey still lived on big cups of milk and butter-slathered bread crusts and turned up his nose at nearly everything else, he refused to eat beef. Or pork. Or chicken. Or anything with any protein at all, which caused me to fret that he would forever be just three feet tall and spindly. And one day I made some fish and put some on his plate and then had a small myocardial infarction when he shoveled it all into his mouth and asked for more. Thus a fish-lover was born, and although he is now three-and-a-HALF feet tall and spindly, we consume a lot of fish.

It also gives our family an awesome party trick; ask the kids what they’d like to eat RIGHT NOW if they could have anything at all, and Chickadee will start rattling off “Cake! Ice cream! CAAAAANDY!” while Monkey’s eye glaze over with longing and he sighs, “Saaaaaaaalmon!” (more…)