Believe It Or Not, We're Still Friends

I grew up in a tract home in the suburbs of Kansas City. The neighborhood was built at the height of the baby boom, and nearly every house was filled with children. It was the kind of neighborhood where kids played outside until the streetlights came on, where moms met every morning for coffee, and where you were never without someone to play with.

Our next door neighbors had built onto their little three bedroom, one bath home by turning the garage into a family room with a bathroom and adding a large, glassed-in porch in the back. They also had a basement. The youngest of their four kids, Cherie, was my best friend. We played together nearly every day, sometimes at our house, sometimes at hers, but most often outside, climbing trees and swinging on my swing set. We rode bikes, played records and danced and sang, walked to and from school together, and were in love with The Monkees. Life was good.

Then one day, Cherie came over, very excited, to tell me her mom was going to have a baby. This pregnancy was a surprise to everyone involved, but instead of being excited like Cherie was, I was mad. And hurt. My mother knew this, and as soon as Cherie went back home, I burst into tears, crying about the unfairness of Cherie getting a baby brother or sister when I wanted one so badly. My mother told me she knew I would feel that way, but I was still not going to become a big sister ever, and I cried harder.

I got over my initial shock, and when the baby was born, I got to hold him, sitting down and supervised by a hovering adult. But Cherie got to help with the baby, and I was jealous. SO jealous! Cherie's mom brought the baby over to our house one summer day and left him  (and Cherie) with us while she ran a quick errand. Cherie and I knelt on the floor, leaning over the baby, who was lying on the floor on a blanket. We were competing with each other to get him to smile and laugh when Cherie accidentally elbowed me in the eye (she had the sharpest elbows ever). My reaction was to punch her in the arm as hard as I could before running out of the room, my mom's voice following me, chastising me for hitting, and about that time, Cherie's mom came back and collected her and the baby. 

All of my jealousy was released with that punch, and long before the black eye faded, I was no longer mad at Cherie for being lucky enough to be a big sister. 

Summer of 1970; I was 9 years old.

The above picture of me, sporting a crocheted headband and a black eye and holding my hamster, was taken in our back yard, obviously not long after Cherie cracked me with her VERY BONY elbow, and was the inspiration for this story, written for Mama's Losing It Writer's Workshop and using the prompt, "Share a childhood photo of yourself and let it inspire a blog post."

It COULD Have Been A Bad Thing

Last week was Spring Break. Glorious, rejuvenating Spring Break. Even though the weather was cool and a little rainy, delightful Spring Break. Because, you know, Spring Break.

It started with a spider lowering itself from the vicinity of the passenger side visor while my daughter and I were driving home from a volleyball tournament, and while we screamed a lot (A LOT), the spider ended up dead and we didn't, and that was a good thing. 

Tuesday morning, Emma and I (mostly I) loaded the car for our trip to Nashville to stay with my Person, Terri, and her daughter (another good thing). We stopped to fill up with gas and get drinks for the road (not a good thing, as Emma threw back a Mountain Dew Code Red and TALKEDNONSTOP the entire trip). 

Because my car has a teeny little habit of burning oil when it is first started (think exits and entrances by the Wicked Witch of the West), I thought it best to check the oil before we hit the road, since we had just taken a 250 mile round trip for the volleyball tournament. When I opened the hood, however, I immediately noticed the absence of the cap that goes on the thingy the oil goes in. Hmmm. I knew my husband had put oil in the car before our trip to the tournament, so he apparently didn't put the cap back on afterwards ("It was dark when I did it" was his later excuse). The oil level was fine, though, so I shut the hood and we took off, with me figuring I'd pick up a cap when we got to Nashville.

Our trip was uneventful. We sang to the radio. We talked (one of us talking way more than the other one). We arrived in Nashville and Terri and I went out to hear an old friend sing, and that's the last thought I gave to the cap that goes on the oil thingy.  After a couple of days of driving around to my favorite restaurants and shopping and shizz like that (many good things), I finally remembered the cap on Thursday and stopped at O'Reilly Auto Parts Store. Here's how it went down:

Me: You know that thingy where you put the oil?
Counter Guy: Yes.
Me: You know that cap that goes on it?
Counter Guy: Yes
Me: I need one of those. Mine's gone.

The very nice counter guy said he didn't have one in the store, but he could have one there in a couple of hours. 

Me: No problem. I've been driving without it since Friday.
Counter Guy: 
Me: What?
Counter Guy: You've been driving a week like that?!
Me: I drove from Joplin to here. Is that bad?
Counter Guy: 

There was an exchange of wild-eyed looks between my counter guy and the OTHER counter guy.

Other Counter Guy: Uhhh, your engine could be ruined.
Counter Guy: The oil will spray out without the cap.
Me:
Counter Guy: I think I'd better check your oil.

He followed me outside and raised the hood. 

Counter Guy (incredulously): There's no oil sprayed in here.

He checked the oil.

Counter Guy (even more incredulously): Your oil is fine.
Me (smugly smiling): Whadya know?

Shaking his head, he closed the hood and went back inside.

I returned to the store a few hours later. My cap had been delivered; in fact, I didn't even have to walk up to the counter and ask for it. The counter guy remembered me (imagine that), rang it up ($3.80 plus tax) and said he'd put it on for me (which I resented slightly, because it implied that I was too stupid to put it on correctly, although I never told him that I wasn't the one who lost the cap in the first place. Maybe I should drive back and set the record straight?). 

So, what could have been a bad thing ended up a good thing. Or, if not really a GOOD thing, then a not as bad as it could have been thing. 

And you KNOW those two counter guys will be telling everyone about the dingbat who drove over 500 miles without the cap on her oil thingy and the car didn't self destruct.

I'll be a legend.

That's a good thing.

This post was an entry for Mama Kat's Writing Workshop with the prompt:

Talk about a time you got lucky.

Redrum, or A Shining Example Of A Pinterest Project

Christmas was but just a blink ago, we've spent January making snowmen crafts at preschool, and now Valentine's Day is looming before us. 

Today, I planned to have the kids in my Primary Class make valentine hearts for the bulletin board. And because I don't like run-of-the-mill, cookie cutter-type craft projects (AND because I have an assistant teacher who is willing to give any project a try, at least once), we did a valentine project for the second year in a row (because we still haven't learned our lesson) and made a craft I found on Pinterest.

We made hearts with their footprints.

Read that again. We made hearts with their FOOTPRINTS. By painting their feet red. And sticking them down on paper.

And then washing their feet, sending them home with clean, but stained, toes.

Rumor has it that brushing paint
onto the bottom of a foot TICKLES.

First person who says it looks easy to do this
with three year olds gets to come to
my class next year and prove it.

Warm, soapy water, pink stained toes.
It only LOOKS like we're cleaning up
a crime scene.

Drying the tootsies, then putting the socks
back on (because 3 year olds can take
 them off, but they can't put them back on).

Our finished product.

Our Pinterest inspiration:

NAILED IT.

One piece of advice: don't attempt this alone, Mrs. Torrance.

This post was an entry for Mama Kat's Writing Workshop with the prompt:

Pinterest inspired! Share a pin you actually tried.

It's Hard To Play Favorites, But Here's My Top 12

If you're a faithful reader of my blog (all seven of you), then you've already read these posts. If you aren't and you haven't, then please do; they're my top 12 favorites for 2014.

Be All That You Can Be: I went to visit a childhood friend and almost joined the army by mistake.

F is for Far--, Uh, Flatulence: Imagine an organ recital while at a restaurant. 

J is for Jesse James: My mother popped off with this little story about our family tree, leading me to wonder what other gems she might have up her sleeve.



L is for Lost: Just me, my husband, and a dead body.

P is for Picher: The largest Superfund Site in U.S. History is located just miles from where I live. I have been fascinated with the story for years.

T is for Tiny Dancer: A story that makes me cry every time I re-read it about my daughter and dance classes,

Mousecapades: Now that my son is in college and taking classes in the same buildings I once did, I thought it was time to 'fess up on a little incident that happened when I was there.

It Started With A Twist Tie: My kitten, Ruby, finds the strangest things to play with....

The Puppy Tails Trilogy: Part 1, Part 2, and The Final Chapter, plus one final look, Teaching an Old Dog A New Trick: One of the best and worst things I have ever done was agree to foster two puppies for a month. 

Believe It Or Not, My Family Really Is Civilized: Another tale from my family's history, this time about my great aunt and her pet chicken.

Success, In Spite Of Attempts By The Secret Service To Thwart My Efforts: Vice President Joe Biden and I are thisclose, but it wasn't easy getting that way!

Slipping Away: An entry in Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop, this 101 word story tugs at my heart.

Read one. Read them all. Tell me what was YOUR favorite.

This post was an entry for Mama Kat's Writing Workshop with the prompt:

A year in review! Compile a year's worth of 
your best blog posts and pictures.

Land Of Our Pilgrim's Pride and Other Thankfuls

Here I am, behind the 8-ball again on getting my Ten Things of Thankful post done in a timely manner. Was this really a long weekend? Because it doesn't seem like one, even though it was a two day work week and five day weekend. But I'm thankful for that long weekend, plus:

1. Emma started practices for her club volleyball team last weekend. I'm so glad she's back with this team! She played with them for two years, got talked into playing on a different club team last year after deciding she wasn't going to play club ball at all, and now we're back to her original club team. Go, Spikers!

2. We celebrated Thanksgiving at preschool with feasts both days. Our Pre-K kids dress as Indians, Primary as Pilgrims and Toddlers as turkeys, and they all contribute items for the feast, plus we've talked all month about the importance of being thankful for all we have. 

Poster child for the Puritan life, right?

3. I received a delicious turkey from two darling "Indians" on Monday. Thanks, girls!

4. On Tuesday afternoon, Emma and I went to the hospital to visit a dear friend who is in hospice care. We only stayed a few minutes, just wanting to tell her we loved her, knowing it would be the last time we would see her in this life. I'm grateful we took the time to go see her, as difficult as it was for us. She looked beautiful and was so glad to see us! I wrote a 101 word story about it for a writer's workshop at Mama Kat's, and you can read about it here.

5. Wednesday morning, my parents drove to our house, then we loaded all of our stuff into their vehicle and all of us headed off to my brother's house for Thanksgiving. We turned a three and a half hour trip into a six and a half hour trip, but we made it!

6. Wednesday evening, we continued a tradition of going to see the Mizzou Tigers volleyball team play their last home game of the year. It's so exciting to watch college level volleyball! Holy mackerel, they hit that ball hard! After the game, we took time to visit with a player who is a sophomore from Springfield, Missouri, and whom we had the privilege of watching play high school ball when her high school team beat the pants off our varsity team. She even remembered meeting us last year!

My dad and brother, watching the game.

Chancellor Loftin was there. That's impressive.

This guy was wearing an SEC belt.
Who knew there was such a thing?

7. Part two of going to the volleyball game was that Emma got to visit a few minutes with her favorite Mizzou volleyball player, Sarah Meister, a senior who just played her last home game of her career. She was so sweet to take time out to speak with Emma and get her picture taken with her again. They both play libero and they are both #4, so she remembered meeting Emma before as well. When we got back to my brother's house, Emma posted the picture on Instagram and tagged Sarah, who wrote a sweet comment and then started following Emma on Instagram, which made her feel like da bomb.

Emma with Sarah, two years ago.

And with Sarah for the last game of her
college career. What a darling girl!

8. Part three: Shakespeare's Pizza. If you've ever had it, then 'nuff said.

9. Thanksgiving dinner was excellent! My brother outdid himself this year. It would have been nice to have had more mashed potatoes, though. Hopefully, next year....

My brother. Write you own caption.

10. My niece SWEARS these are not weevils in the soap in her shower, as I originally thought, but just to be on the safe side, I did not use it. (She swears it's some kind of lavender bits, but I'm still not completely convinced, given the family history, and if you haven't read this post about how my brother fed me weevils, then you should.)

Lavender? Mhm.

Now home again from our trip, Christmas decorations out of the attic and in much disarray around the house, and I've got a college boy to return to school, so I'm off and running again. Link up, if you haven't already!

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Slipping Away

The door to the room was ajar.

“Is she asleep?” I asked. “Don’t wake her up.”

But the woman gently shook her mother, who blinked, then held her arms out. My daughter went first, hugging her gently, then me, feeling how fragile she was.

She was wearing pretty pajamas instead of a hospital gown. No poking or prodding necessary; just pain medications to keep her comfortable.

“Sit down,” she instructed, and we did. We each held one of her hands, talking, smiling.

We hugged her again, told her we loved her.

And we left, not able to say the words “goodbye.”

This post was an entry for Mama Kat's Writing Workshop with the prompt:

Write a story in exactly 101 words.

You Survive A Power Outage Your Way, I'll Do It Mine

In December of 2007, we had an ice storm. Not ice. Not sleet. An ice STORM. As in an inch to an inch and a half of ice encasing trees, power lines, cars, playground equipment, roofs, grass, signs, gutters, and pretty much anything else but the streets. Weirdly enough, the streets themselves were relatively clear of ice covering. 

It was a Sunday morning, only a week before the children's Christmas program at our church. My daughter, almost 9, and I left the house to go to church, because we couldn't miss play rehearsal! As the streets were not ice covered, I thought it wouldn't be that bad. My daughter, however, was sure we were going to die, and I assured her it would be fine once we got out of our neighborhood. We crunched and slipped and slid across the grass to the driveway, and just as we got to the car, we heard a crack, crack, cracking sound.

"Listen," I said to Emma. "The ice is already melting and falling off the trees."

The next thing we knew, there was a tremendous CRASH, and a 25 foot tall tree across the street crashed to the ground. Had it fallen a few feet in a different direction, it would have landed onto the street and dangerously close to where we were standing. Emma immediately began howling, and we crunched back to the house and went inside to safety.

Within an hour, our power went out.

This was not good.

Our house is old (built in 1926) and drafty. It has 3800 square feet of hardwood floors with no carpeting. There is a gas furnace for each floor, but the blower needs electricity to work, so no heat. There are two fireplaces that were not usable (we were kicking ourselves that we had never done anything about that, but the remedy was very expensive). The house started to get chilly very quickly.

My husband called my in-laws, who lived on the other side of town, and when we found out that they had power, we headed there. Sadly, we had to leave our kitties at home, because my in-laws are not cat people (and one of them may or may not actually be allergic and I'll leave it at that). We drove the few miles to their house, creeping down the streets, avoiding fallen limbs. Their house was warm and had LIGHTS, and we settled in for a cozy stay. 

An hour later, THEIR power went out.

Their home was in a heavily wooded area. I went into an upstairs bedroom to look out at what the storm had done. It was a winter wonderland, if you could discount the fact that power lines were down all over town. As I looked out the window in the quiet of a house with no electricity humming through it, I could hear the cracking of ice, followed by the crash of tree after tree falling from the weight of the ice on its limbs.

My father in law built a fire in their fireplace. We cooked on the gas grill on the back porch. It was all campy and kind of fun. Fun-ish.

By the next afternoon, I was done, especially after I drove back to our house to check on the kitties. The house was very cold (we left water running in our bathroom sinks to prevent freezing). Per my dad, I poured antifreeze into the toilets. A thermometer in my bathroom showed it was 39 degrees in there. The kitties were curled up together on a bed of blankets in the basement. I went back to my in-laws home and told my husband I was out of there the next day and was taking the kids and cats with me.

My parents, who lived an hour's drive to the north of us, missed the ice storm. I loaded clothes, cats, and kids into the car and headed out. About twenty miles north of town, a chunk of ice fell off some power lines that crossed the highway and crashed onto the windshield and hood of our car. My son and I, sitting in the front seat, thought we were goners, but the windshield remained intact, and contrary to how it sounded and felt, there was no anvil-sized dent in the hood of the car from the impact of the ice, either. By the time we were thirty or so miles to the north, we ran out of ice almost completely. 

The kids, cats and I spent the rest of the week at my parents' house, warm and cozy. School was canceled for the entire week, as more than half the schools in the district had no power. While the power was restored at my in-laws' home late on the day we left (a perk of living near the two hospitals), our home was without power for 7 days.

Rumor has it that this winter could be very cold and wet. Should you experience a winter storm-induced power outage like we did, here are my recommendations for how to survive it:

1. Pack your bags, gather up your kids and pets and leave.
2. Before you walk out the door, turn on the water in a couple of sinks to prevent the pipes from freezing and pour some antifreeze into the toilet bowls. Better safe than sorry.
3. Go somewhere that has power, preferably a family member's home, where they have a familial obligation to take you in and keep you.
4. If the power goes off there, repeat #2.
5. Ignore your husband when he calls you an electricity whore.
6. Also ignore that everything in your refrigerator and deep freeze are defrosting, because there's not a thing you can do about it.
7. Stay in your warm, happy place until the power is restored at your own home.

May the warmth be with you.

This post was an entry for Mama Kat's Writing Workshop with the prompt:

List 7 ways to survive a power outage.

Believe It Or Not, My Family Really Is Civilized

My great aunt Daisy was born in 1900, the youngest of three children born to Isaac and Minnie Jefferson. Her brother, Thomas (my grandfather), was ten years older than her; her sister, Edith, was six years older. She was the baby and spoiled rotten.

How rotten, you ask?

The family let her have a pet chicken.

How does that make her spoiled rotten?

They let her keep the pet chicken IN THE HOUSE.

There's more.

They let the chicken roost at night on the back of a dining room chair, newspapers spread on the floor beneath it.

Neither Daisy nor her sister ever married, and they lived together their entire lives. My brother and I spent many, many happy hours at their home while growing up, where WE were thoroughly spoiled and were never told "no" (except for the one time I BEGGED them to buy me a darling little monkey that was in the pet section of a store we had gone to when I was about 7, and they didn't IMMEDIATELY say no; they actually gave it at least a moment's consideration, but, wisely, thought better of it). Edith (or "Ecie" as we called her) did the cooking and the cleaning. She paid the bills, fixed things that were broken (including cars, on occasion), took care of the household.

But Daisy? She was always the baby, the spoiled one, until she passed away at 83. She was the one who played games with us. And watched soap operas. And made fudge and popcorn balls. Who was a picky eater and was catered to her by her family her entire life. She was fun.

And she once had a freakin' pet chicken! How awesome is that?

Daisy and her chicken, ca. 1912

This post was an entry for Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop with the prompt:

Throwback time! Share an old photo and tell us about it.

Teaching An Old Dog A New Trick

Last month, on a total whim, my daughter and I decided to foster puppies from the humane society.  My reasoning was this:

1. The crawler on the tv screen during the morning news said the humane society had a great need for fosters for cats and dogs.

2. Our three cats would not tolerate it very well if we brought in foster kittens, besides the fact that the fosters might bring a kitty illness in that ours could catch, even if we kept them in separate parts of the house.

3. It would be really hard to give up kittens that we had fostered, because we are cat people, but puppies? We could give up puppies. They're cute, but we don't want a dog, so we wouldn't have a problem when it was time to return puppies for adoption.

We got our puppies, two of them, shepherd/great pyrenees mixes from a litter of six, on August 2. We named them Audrey and Olivia, because we thought the names they got from the humane society were stupid.

You could have put the sum total of knowledge we had about taking care of a puppy (let alone TWO of them) on the head of a pin and still had room to etch War and Peace on the pinhead.

We tried our best to housebreak them. We gave them a reward every time they pottied outside. They rewarded us by pooping and peeing all over our family room floor.

They got sick. REALLY sick. They both had coccidiosis (a single-cell parasite that attacked their intestinal tract). They both had kennel cough. Olivia was sick enough that I thought she wouldn't make it. Twice.

They chewed any and everything.

They occasionally had accidents in their crate, requiring baths and cleaning of the crate first thing in the morning. In the early days of the coccidiosis, one of them pooped in the crate in the night. Squishy poop. They got it on themselves, of course. Then, taking it to another level, Audrey apparently dipped her tail in it and painted poop all over the inside of the crate. 

And I asked for this.

But after four weeks of puppies, four weeks of alternating between enjoying them and wishing they were GONE, of cleaning up poop and pee off the floor, walking them at all hours, napping with them in our laps, playing with them, cursing them for chewing our flip flops, and worrying about their health, we fell in love.

Then it was time to return them to the humane society for transport to the rescue group that was going to find homes for them. A rescue group 500 miles away, where we would never see them again.

The manager of the humane society told us the name of the group where they were going, as we stood there crying, turning our babies over to them. She told us she cries every time she sends her own fosters off for adoption.

My daughter and I said one last goodbye to the puppies, gave them one last hug and kiss, then walked out the door and stood on the sidewalk in front, hugging each other and sobbing. On the drive home, we talked about how we could never do this again. It was too much mess. Too much heartbreak. Too much everything.

But the next day, I contacted the rescue group and asked if we could be kept informed about how the puppies were doing. I joined their Facebook page. And yesterday, their pictures turned up on the Facebook page, along with those of their siblings.

And now I get it. I get what fostering is all about. 

Look at these six puppies. Four of them stayed in a kennel at the humane society, because there weren't enough foster families to take them in. Ours were loved and nurtured and maybe spoiled a little. Can you tell which were our puppies and which lived at the shelter?

#1 is Audrey, #6 is Olivia. Look how perky they are, how bright their eyes! 

We did a good thing. It wasn't always easy, but we did it. 

Will we foster again? Yes. (Shhhh! Don't tell my husband or the three cats.)

Are we sorry we didn't keep them? Nope. We are not dog people. Not entirely sure we are PUPPY people, but we are foster people.

Are we going to cry again next time? You betcha.

Help an overcrowded shelter in your area and be a foster parent to a dog or cat (or puppy or kitten or two or seven). 

Want to read the rest of our adventures in fostering? Read Puppy Tails, Part 1, Puppy Tails, Part 2, and Puppy Tails, The Final Chapter.

This post is an entry for this week's Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop with the prompt:

Talk about one thing you learned last month.

Mousecapades

My son is a freshman at the same college I attended. He is a Cell and Molecular Biology major, minoring in Chemistry.  He had over 30 AP and dual credit hours when he started college and got to skip over all kinds of lower level classes, like English Composition and College Algebra. He's taking classes now that make my head spin. He is a genius kid.

I was an Elementary Education major in college, and I'll be the first to tell you, it doesn't get much easier than that, folks. Math for Elementary Teachers. Art for Elementary Teachers. Music for Elementary Teachers (see the trend here?). 

Then there was Biology for Elementary Teachers.

I took the class spring semester of my freshman year. We had a lecture three days a week (and I honestly cannot tell you one single, solitary thing about that), plus a three hour lab one day a week, taught by a graduate student. 

My lab was on Monday afternoons, and it was filled with the super-geeky type of Elementary Education majors, the ones who sit in the front row and try to impress the professor and remind him he forgot to give the homework assignment. I chose a seat in the back of the room, at the end of a lab table, thinking this was going to be one long semester, when a girl came in the door, glanced around the room at all the goody-two-shoes sitting in there, and sat on the stool across from me. Her name was Liz, and we became instant friends.

The class was a complete waste of time. I guess the Biology department didn't think we lowly Elementary Ed majors were worth the cost of dissecting anything (which, honestly, I was okay with), so the graduate assistant just showed us a fetal pig that had been dissected by a "real" class. 

We did do one minor experiment. We had some chemical concoction in a test tube and were instructed to heat it over a Bunson burner. I was holding the test tube in the flame with a pair of tongs as Liz read the directions. She was just getting to the part that said, "Continually move the test tube from side to side and never hold it still while in the flame," when the liquid inside shot up out of the tube. Probably should have read the part about continually moving it sooner.... The only other thing we did that was like a "real" Biology class involved mice. Oh, the mice!

We were given a glass cage with two white mice in it, a boy mouse and a girl mouse, and we were to observe them over the semester. Each set of lab partners was assigned a week of mouse duty (that is, cleaning out the cage, feeding and watering them). Mice being mice, our girl mouse was soon in the family way, and each week, we watched her get bigger and bigger. And soon enough, she had a litter of eight naked babies.

The lab partners who had the luck of drawing birthing week as their week to care for the mouse family made off easy. The babies were too small to move, so no cage cleaning; they only had to make sure they had plenty of food and water and that was that.

The week following that was our week. Liz and I went into the lab to care for our little family, only to find out the baby daddy had eaten one of the babies (MOST of one of the babies, anyway). We removed him and put him in a separate cage. We removed mom and her bundles of joy, each covered with downy white now, their eyes still closed, weighed them (because we were trying to score a few brownie points with the graduate assistant after the whole test tube debacle), cleaned out the cage, filled it with fresh bedding, filled their food dish, and filled their ginormous water bottle. We nestled mama and babies back into the cage and were clipping the water bottle into place when the plug fell out and the water began gushing out of the bottle, filling the glass cage with an inch or so of water. 

Frantically, we started scooping babies out of the water, dropping them into a box. Next, we fished mom out, putting her in the box with her children. With paper towels, we tried to dry them all off, but it was hardly efficient. We emptied the watery cedar chip bedding from their cage, dried it thoroughly, refilled it with fresh litter, gave them new food, refilled the ginormous water bottle, making sure THIS time that the cork was firmly in place, and returned the mouse mama and babies to their cage. Again. And we left.

At our next lab class, the graduate assistant remarked that there was something wrong with our mice; two of the babies had died, and none of them looked particularly right. Their fur was a little scrappy, and it had yellowed a bit. Liz and I looked at each other, saying nothing. In the next week, two more babies died. The remaining babies survived, but not long after they were weaned, the mom went to mousy heaven, too. The babies grew into adult mice (they do that FAST), but they were yellowed, their fur scraggly.

The graduate assistant was befuddled by this.

And Liz and I, feeling like horrible, horrible mouse killers when we were just trying to do the right thing, never let out a squeak about what happened.

This week, after a long sabbatical, I am participating in Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop with the prompt:

"Whose fault was it?"

A Little Older, A Little Better

Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop prompt #5: You know you're getting old because...


Today is my birthday.

2nd birthday

And it would be a perfect day to write about getting old. If I planned on it happening, that is.

I WANT to get older, given that the alternative to getting older is dying. (Can't go backwards; no backsies, 'member?) 

Photo bombed by the cat

But get old? Not if I can help it.

Getting old is a state of mind, and giving in to it is giving up.

9th birthday

So I will continue to run and slide across my hardwood floors in my sock feet. I will skip whenever my heart feels like it. I will sort my M&M's by color before I eat them. I will startle the cat just to watch him jump. I will sing with gusto in the car and throw in dance moves as necessary.  I will eat cookie dough. I will Zumba like a boss. I will use the toothpicks from my sandwich like chopsticks and pick up pieces of lettuce from my plate (purely hypothetical, of course...). I will dance in the kitchen. 

At 5, showing off my twist skills

I shall grow older, but I shall not grow old.

And you can't make me.

So there.

Should be 53 candles. May be
a little short, fire codes being
what they are and all....

What I Didn't Do This Summer

Here's what I didn't do this summer.

Paint my bathroom. Because I can't paint it until I get all the wallpaper glue scrubbed off. When I peeled the wallpaper off the walls, a thick layer of glue was left behind. Thick and cement-like. I have sprayed it with commercial wallpaper remover, with hot water mixed with Dawn dishwashing detergent, and with hot water mixed with fabric softener, then scraped and scraped and scraped.  And it still. won't. come. off. I've only been working on it, off and on (mostly off) for four years, since I got bored during the Great Swine Flu Quarantine at our house and pulled my first loose corner of wall paper....

My cats should only be this talented.

Clean the basement. (For the record, it's just a basement. It's not finished, so before you read this, don't think we have totally trashed usable living space.) It wasn't in too bad of shape pre-tornado (our personal timelines are usually defined as either before the tornado or after the tornado). Then it got filled up, temporarily, with other people's salvaged items, some of which were spread around to dry. Then when we needed to add something of our own to the basement, we just set it down anywhere. Just as we were returning the salvaged items and might be able to see the floor in the foreseeable future, my dad closed his hardware store, and we added a bunch of crap that we might need someday. End result is, we can't walk through the place. And I'm not exaggerating.

Fletcher on the basement stairs. Did you
really think I was going to show you what
a disaster it is down there?! Psshhh!

Finish decorating my daughter's room. For her 14th birthday, which was in February, we promised to paint her room and fix it up (it hadn't been painted since it was her nursery, and she CONSTANTLY COMPLAINED about the pale lavender walls). Found an old chest of drawers in March that had been completely redone with Annie Sloan paint. Brought it home and put it in the living room until we painted the room. Then I found an old 1920s style vanity in March that we brought home and put in the living room, where I painted it with chalk paint (and it looks AWESOME, if I do say so myself). And there both pieces sat until my daughter finally decided on a color to paint the room. That was accomplished in June, and she and I painted the room and arranged the furniture, but we've never put up window treatments. Or hung pictures on the wall. Or cleaned out her closet.  Maybe for her 15th birthday....

Before:
If you look in the lower right corner of the mirror,
you can see a corner of the chest of drawers.

During:
This took many, many coats of chalk paint and
many, many, many coats of paste wax.
Where's the "After" you may ask?
Forgot to take one.

The war paint was hilarious until she had to scrub it off.

I was also going to work on the kids' scrapbooks this summer. Write lesson plans for the school year ahead of time. Recover an ottoman. Paint my bedroom.

Well, this was a fun little writing exercise. Rather confirms something I have long suspected.

My name is Dyanne, and I'm an underachiever.

I'm a procrastinator.

I'm an underachieving procrastinator.



Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop prompt #2 What did you not get accomplished this summer that you wish you had time for?