Pull up a box of Kleenex and sit down
There’s that old saying—and it’s absolutely true, just ask anyone—about how moms don’t get sick. We’re supposed to be invincible, you know, and failing that, at least uncomplaining. We’re one step up from mail carriers; neither rain nor sleet nor hacking cough can deter us from our appointed nagging.
Well, I’ve never been invincible and I pretty much complain even when I’m well. It’s not a good set-up for that whole Supermom gig, I guess.
Of course it figures that I would be felled by a virus just as the Today Show furor is dying down, and life is feeling somewhat normal… and then Dooce links me and I am flooded with new visitors. Um, hello! Come on in! Please disregard the mess. And the snot. And the whining about how I want to go back to bed. Really, normally I’m much more entertaining. Or at least showered. And… oh, hey! Have you seen my new grill? Shiny! read more…
Hunka hunka burnin’ love
Greetings from the land of Unplanned-For Expenses, otherwise known simply as Home Ownership. Why, we’d noticed the deck seemed to be settling a little, last year, when we moved in, and this spring we could no longer ignore that the gazebo seems a bit… SLANTY… and so we called our favorite contractor and asked him to come take a look. He checked it out and told us how much it would be to bring in a jack and prop up the corner and reinforce it, and we nodded and agreed, and the price was not exactly pocket change, but it made sense and wasn’t too traumatic.
The same week, it became clear that we need a new air conditioner. For some strange reason, the unit which is ORIGINAL TO THE HOUSE was having problems. (Hint: This is not a new house, y’all.) FORTUNATELY, we have separate units for upstairs and downstairs! UNFORTUNATELY, the furnace attached to the ailing AC unit is original (read: dying!) as well! Yay! read more…
Revenge of the mint
Wow, do you people have strong feelings about planting mint. SHEESH. Maybe I REALLY REALLY LIKE mint. Maybe the mint is in containers in the planter. Maybe it is hilarious to me that I am all “Hooray! I made an herb garden finally!” and you all commence freaking out because ZOMG! MIIIIINT!
Yesterday I planted jalapeños and two kinds of tomatoes. Would you like to yell at me about that, too? Because I am pretty sure that the tomatoes said to bury 80% of the plant for best results, see, and I may have only managed to get them down into the soil up to about 76%. I’m sorry.
Yesterday was also BOTH Mother’s Day and Otto’s and my first anniversary, and I need to tell you all about both of those things at some point, but today is going to be slightly abbreviated. read more…
Smell this. Smell it!
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?)
Little pitchers have big snark
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. read more…
Love is out at the pond
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. read more…
The finest swamp in town
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. read more…
It’s as far out as it goes
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. read more…
The soil is hard, like our heads
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. read more…
Is this what he meant?
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. read more…