FOR THE TAKING: a used, somewhat anxious and slightly traumatized dog. (Defects courteous of former owner. We are responsible only for some recent wear and tear.) FULL DISCLOSURE: dog is currently suffering from a minor addiction to chipmunk. Side effects from this debilitating addiction seem to be: · An inability to stay indoors resulting in drooling, shaking and aggressive body slamming when near any door · Tunnel vision – literally and figuratively · A ridiculous skewed hold on reality that she will actually catch one again · The urge to stick her face in every hole that litters our yard and, · When the whiff of chipmunk tempts, the compulsion to dig until the hole is dog size while the chipmunk sits nearby and points and laughs, resulting in no remorse, no memory recall and this: NO SHAME!!!
Alternately, we would be willing to part with any/all of the one million chipmunks that current reside on our property. You haul.
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I'll do a follow up on my blind friend-date soon but Sunday is Mother's Day here and I feel I should honor Mom in some way. Since we are not a gifts or cards or brunch type of family, here goes -
My mother is about as nontraditional as you can get. She doesn't resemble any parental figure you might see in movies or on TV or in books. She says what she thinks. She doesn't coddle or futz. And she can do build/sew/make just about anything and knows more about everything that anyone I know. I used to tell people she would read the dictionary for fun and they would think I was kidding but I wasn't. She does. Because my mother is awesome and different and not at all boring. When she was twenty-something, she met my father in school in Oregon and he asked her to move to Kenya and she "thought it would be interesting..." so she got a job with IBM, packed up her life and moved there, sight unseen. Because along with all the other abilities she has, my mother also has no fear. And by "no fear" I mean she's not scared of snakes or spiders or things that go bump in the night or of being a white American woman moving to an African country in the sixties to live with an black African man. And, when years later, things were not going well, she did not hesitate to move back to America and start over again - at thirty something with nothing but her two slightly traumatized children, three trunks of memories and no American work history. If she were a superhero, she would make her own costume, build her own lair and be perfectly capable of saving the world without a sidekick. And she would build that lair and make that costume and save that world using nothing but reclaimed and recyclable materials. In fact, I think the only thing my mother can't do is sing in key. And who needs a superhero that sings in key? Anyway, to my nontraditional superhero, Happy Mother's Day! Pppttht – trying to be witty and brilliant this morning is not going well. My brain is misfiring more than my poor lawn guy’s old lawnmower. By the way, I still think it’s totally weird that we have a lawn guy. As Husband pointed out, the cost of buying a mower, edger, blower is way more than paying our guy to mow the weeds. And that doesn’t include the couples therapy that we’d need when Husband would or wouldn’t mow the lawn and I would have to and I'd do it badly or run into the side of the house or cut off my leg or something drastic. But having a 'lawn guy' makes me feel like we’re only steps away from the Mayor of Our Street and her “man” that she has over every day including Sundays doing something on her house or to her yard...
Anyway, brain isn’t working because had coffee yesterday when I met a new friend for a chat. And I drank that coffee waaay after the 9am coffee-drinking deadline I have now that I’m old. It meant I was wicked productive yesterday afternoon and then totally wide awake all night worrying about everything. Everything, by the way, includes snake babies and how they’re hatching in my walls, the ongoing headache I have being a brain tumor, the possible heart attack I was having while worrying about the brain tumor and this blind friend-date thing I have today with twenty plus women. The snake babies are nothing I can control. Same goes for the tumors and heart attacks. I blame WebMD for those. This blind friend-date thing is totally my doing. Well, really it's Husbands doing. He’s forcing me to go meet new people, which I am very bad at, so that I'll leave him alone. Making friends when you’re older is hard. Unless you’re in a set weekly group thing like church or you like the people you work with and hang out after or you bowl or something. Or, like the way I met my new friend from my coffee date; you volunteer at a conference and they ask you back to volunteer the next year because you were awesome (i.e. very loud and very bossy.) If you don't have an thing or group or club, striking up a conversation with someone new is nothing short of awkward. And, if you read this blog at all, you know I am very good at awkward. I told Husband I had plenty of friends but he said Facebook and Twitter and the like are not a healthy friendship to have. I hate it when he’s right. Sure there’s some back and forth with folks on social media but reading someone’s posts about women’s reproductive rights or their presidential choice or their reposts from George Takei is not a conversation. Really, it's just like having imaginary friends who sometimes respond to your pithy posts about very big snakes. Hence my blind friend-date with twenty women who are new to Nashville. Now I did lots of blind dating before I met Husband. And all of them were awkward. Every. Single. One. There was the guy that swore he was 5’7” on a good day but was clearly 5’5” - obviously not having a good day. There was the guy that kept asking me if I like Sci-Fi this and Sci-Fi that and didn’t listen to a word I said or pay attention to the looooong awkward pauses and my body language that said, “Don’t touch me. Ever.” And then asked me out again anyway. And my favorite, the guy I met at the movies to watch my old boss in The Cooler – where she got naked and we saw all her bits and bobs and watched her have sex on a very, very big movie screen. WICKED AWKWARD! After that display, neither of us could make eye contact, or small talk nor endure a polite silent walk to the car together. We just nodded and walked away. Heck, even my first blind date with Husband was awkward. He babbled and told embarrassing stories and I babbled and told embarrassing stories and both of us were dorky and awkward about the whole thing. But for some damn reason, we found each other’s stories amusing and the dorky-ness endearing and we got married eight months later. I don’t see that happening today – the amusing part. I see me bumping into furniture and spilling my drink all over the fancy table. Or getting into a discussion with someone about how the government should stay the hell out of my womb – and then pulling out my phone to show off the picture of my womb. This is bound to be The Erection Story all over again. Then again, it could go well. I could meet someone like my new friend yesterday; someone who found it funny when I told her about the picture that my uncle sent me of the duck penis after I’d told him I’d watched the owls do it. Someone like my new friend who then told me about this obscure art that is all crystal animal penises and then sat with me in a restaurant not far from the former home of President Andrew Jackson and Googled ‘animal penis art’ just to prove that it existed. As I in turn Googled ‘Wall of Vagina’ to show her it was indeed a thing. It sure wasn’t first day of school “wanna be my friend” kind of of stuff but was highly entertaining. Maybe today, I’ll meet someone like her… Not that my new friends all need to be well versed with genitalia - human or otherwise – just that a twisted sense of humor and a Google search is one way to break the ice… Yeah, there is no way this isn’t going to be awkward. The breakdown of conversations with Husband this weekend goes like this:
1% - me telling him about the epic Owl/Cooper’s Hawk fight I saw Saturday morning. 4% - both of us fighting – I mean discussing loudly our new lifestyle plan. 5% - Husband discussing the intricacies of the studio build. Again. 60 % - both of us saying every few minutes, “Can you believe there was a five foot snake IN our house???” Though in my case, it was more like, “Can you believe there was a #$%#$% FIVE FOOT SNAKE IN OUR HOUSE?!?!? 30% – both of us trying to figure out how in the heck he got INTO the house? And how long he’d been in there? And was he sitting on my desk while I was checking my computer first thing in the morning? And what the odds were that he laid egg babies? And…? And…? And…? I’m exhausted and have a headache and we still don’t have answers. And I didn’t get pictures of the epic Owl/Hawk fight but here is a shot of the Cooper’s Hawk before he attacked, one when he took a break during the fight to regroup and a few pictures of the Wild Turkey that wandered through yesterday. It's getting all Wild Animal Planet over here! Last week, we noticed the AC guys had left a rather large hole for their pipes and that some beasties had been using it as an entrance to our house. Not being fans of creatures in our house, we filled the hole with insulation and steel wool, as the trusty Internet had indicated was one way to solve the problem. The next day, the insulation and the steel wool were in pieces on the ground. Problem not solved. So, Husband resorted to using expanding spray foam in the hole. And he used a lot of it. The wall now looks like it has a large orange goiter, the kind you see on Google when you search for strange bumps. We were feeling pretty proud of our quick and somewhat permanent solution. Until we realized that whatever had been in the hole was still in the house. You know what is not a restful way to go to sleep? Have your husband tell you that there was something on your desk at some point in the afternoon, knocked a bunch of stuff over and then ask you to come down to the basement at 11:30pm and look in the garage with him because he is sure he heard “something” moving about in there. Nightmares! THEN, just when things couldn’t get creepier, Husband called to me while I was in the garden weeding and told me he’d just spotted the beast under the tool cabinet. A mad rush into the house I went, down onto my knees to see where the bugger went and discovered that what was under the tool cabinet was not a chipmunk but a SNAKE! A #$%!&*#$%!&* BIG SNAKE! What followed was a mess of me trying to get pictures and video of the snake and post them to Facebook and email them to my mother and brother and fifth cousin and the guy I knew in high school - all while Husband was actively trying to get the snake out of the house. It took Husband a few tries but he finally got snake outside and onto the wall near the driveway. A wall I will now never go on, go near, or look at ever again. FYI, fireplace tongs do not work. Neither does trying to scoop it onto a stick. Or pretending you are okay with grabbing its tail like they do on the discovery channel. What does work; a broomstick with a tiny noose dangling from the end, slipped over the head of the snake. Apparently me, running around squealing, darting back and forth and generally adding to the chaos was, according to Husband, not helpful at all. Also not helpful, my mother suggesting that we KEEP THE SNAKE INSIDE THE HOUSE because he could eat chipmunks and mice and the like. Or my uncle emailing me this advice: Next time you feel like you have to transport a snake, it’s best to just drag it from mid-body (you wouldn’t like being dangled by your neck, I imagine) or gently lift it into a plastic garbage can or the like. NEXT TIME??? Next time I’m moving after burning the house down as so many of my Facebook friends suggested I do. You know what else isn’t helpful, Husband and I trying to figure out how the snake got into the house? Was it through the hole the AC guys or the hole in the screen or the chimney or the deep down in the dirt through a chipmunk hole and into the cinderblock? Also totally not conducive to a good nights sleep ever again; Husband reading me lovely facts from a Rat snake removal website like THE FEMALE WILL REMAIN PREGNANT FOR UP TO THE THREE MONTHS AND CAN GIVE BIRTH TO AS LITTLE AS 3 SNAKES AND AS MUCH AS 80 SNAKES. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Let me tell you, going outside and trying to weed again after that excitement did not go as planned. Sure I grabbed and pulled a bunch of stuff but the after the tick I spotted crawling up my arm and the five hundred possible snake sightings I had no choice but to quit and run inside to the safety of the couch. I might never leave the house again. Well, until the damn snake babies hatch from wherever the snake left them and they slither into bed with me and I run screaming down the street. Yeah, I’m never sleeping again. Here's a short sideways video of Husband removing the dang thing. Note Tigger the Dog trying to figure out what all the fuss was about. Just for a bit of perspective, Husband is 6ft tall! |
AuthorMy name is ej. I'm a girl. I say that because with the short hair and the short initials, folks aren't always sure. More brilliant insights to who I am in About me Archives
April 2019
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