Karen Lingefelt

When One Phone Recording Talks to Another

2009-04-29T13:10:00.007-04:00

Our answering machine has picked up a bizarre recorded message several times over the past month or so. Oddly enough, the recording asks for a different person each time—but that person is never someone named Lingefelt.

A woman’s deceptively pleasant voice does most of the talking except when stating the name of the person they’re looking for, then the voice becomes deeper, stiffer, and—dare I say it—more menacing. (All proper nouns are fictional, see previous blog entry.)

“This is National Credit Data Collection Systems of America with an important phone call for Lausanne Davin. If you are Lausanne Davin, please press 1. If you are not Lausanne Davin, please press 2.”

I don’t pick up the phone to press anything, I just listen. Next comes my favorite part of the message:

“If you pressed 1, please stay on the line. If you pressed 2, please do not listen to the rest of this message.”

Excuse me? You dialed my phone number. You’re taking up valuable recording space on my answering machine. Your blathering has interrupted me and pulled me away from matters more important, even if they’re not as blogworthy. This is my home, my private domain, and through your own ineptitude, you have intruded upon it. Therefore, since you are now here, I jolly well intend to listen to every word you have to say henceforth.

It’s as if the recorded caller has never heard of answering machines or voice mail, or they might say, “If you are Lausanne Davin, please pick up.” But they can’t make her pick up anymore than they can make me not listen to the rest of their message.

So I listen to the rest of the message, even though I’m not supposed to. Apparently they don’t want me to know that Lausanne is in deep doo-doo debt and has some serious ’splainin’ to do to her creditors. She is to call a certain number between certain hours on certain days, unless she wants her name reported to certain agencies.

Only why don’t they want me to know? If they think she can be reached at this number, wouldn’t they appreciate me taking the message for her, perhaps even talking to her as a friend who cares, and persuade her to pay her bills? Not that I intend to give her a loan myself, now that I know from this message she'll never repay the money.

Or are they afraid I might use the information against her, spread mean gossip about her? “You remember Lausanne Davin, don’t you? Well, guess what I heard about her? She’s—(gasp!)—behind on her credit card payments! Can you believe it?”

In this day and age, that’s shockingly juicy.

But here’s what bewilders me about this phone call: If you have an answering machine or voice mail, why pick up and press 1 or 2, regardless of whether you’re Lausanne or Karen, if you’re going to hear their message anyway?

Given the circumstances and my own overly suspicious nature (oh, go ahead and call me paranoid if you like, it won't be the first time), I can’t help thinking that if—just for kicks—I picked up this phone call and pressed 1 pretending to be Lausanne, I would not get the same message I’m not supposed to listen to.

Instead, I would get trouble.

I could get trapped in a web of “reverse identity theft” in which I would somehow find myself on the hook for Lausanne’s debts—which could very well extend to overdue library books, parking tickets, arrest warrants, fines from her homeowner’s association for displaying the wrong colored gnome in her flower bed, and don’t even get me started on the unwanted “parting gifts” she might have accumulated from her string of ne’er-do-well exes. Lausanne Davin may not even exist at all, but only be a figment of someone’s imagination, invented solely for that person’s fiendish amusement and potential profit. (Hmm—rather like the “real” Lausanne Davin.)

On the other hand, if that were so, then why have the "press 2" option?

I would rather not know, but instead be thankful for the answering machine. It screens, baffles, and amuses.

A Midnight Visit from the Police, OR: Let's Scare Karen to Death, OR--Just a Thanksgiving Tale

2009-11-29T10:54:00.009-05:00

If your husband happens to be out late one night on a job, and a police car pulls up in front of your house past midnight but you didn’t even call 911, what are you supposed to think?

If you’re like me, you’ll think the very worst and go into Maximum Panic Mode.

I went to bed around 11:30 pm the night before Thanksgiving, only to be jolted awake less than an hour later by our two barking beagles. My first thought was they were calling out to a neighbor taking their own dog for a midnight stroll, but when the barking persisted, I had to get up and investigate—especially since I was afraid they would wake up the Crown Prince (who was staying with us for the holiday) and Baby Bear.

I carefully lifted a slat in the blinds covering the living room window and peered out. Terror slashed through me as I saw a police car parked right in front of our house. The silhouette of a very tall officer stood at the foot of the driveway, feet apart, facing our house, looking very much as if he were trying to ascertain if anyone was home. There were no cars parked in our driveway, and all the lights were off.

I could only think of one reason for him to be out there. My critique partner, Jean, who writes romantic suspense, has described this very scenario in a few of her books, and it usually includes dialogue along the lines of, “We’re very sorry to inform you . . . we need you to come with us so you can identify—”

NO-OOOHHH!!!

The cop remained standing at the end of the driveway, arms akimbo. Why didn’t he come up and ring the doorbell and put me out of my—or rather, plunge me into further misery? Perhaps I should go out there to meet him. “Excuse me, sir, would you mind telling me why you’re in front of my house? You’re making my dogs bark and you’re scaring the hell out of me.”

If only he didn’t look like Gort standing outside the flying saucer. I could almost hear the menacing theme music from the theremin.

But I wasn’t dressed to meet anyone save Mr. Lucky, so I ran back to the bedroom to throw some clothes on. Whimpering and trembling all over, my heart hammering, I returned to the living room window and . . . Gort and the police car were gone.

Now what? Was he on his way back to the station because he thought there was no one home except for the dogs? But he hadn’t rung the bell. At least I hadn’t heard the doorbell; maybe I was still asleep when he rang it and that’s what started the dogs barking.

I didn’t know what to do. Should I call up 911?

“What’s your emergency?” the dispatcher would ask.

“Well, I don’t know that it’s an emergency,” I would say in a tremulous voice broken with panicked sobs, “but my husband is out right now and I just saw a cop parked in front of my house like maybe he was here to—” Scratch that.

Instead I called Mr. Lucky’s cell phone. To my dismay, all I got was voice mail.

By now I was totally freaking. I tried his work place. Maybe he was still there, or maybe someone else there would tell me something . . . or would they?

One his co-workers answered the phone, and to my everlasting relief, Mr. Lucky was there, safe and sound. His cell phone, he said, was out in the car. But he couldn’t explain anymore than I could why that cop might have been outside our house. The sprinklers hadn’t been running, so it couldn’t be because we were watering on the wrong night.

I was about to go back to bed when the dogs started barking again. I returned to the living room window and—GORT WAS BACK!

At least he remained inside his car, but now what? Was this part of a stakeout? Were we under surveillance? But for what?

I wondered what would happen if I just went out there to ask. Would I get shot? Thrown across the trunk of his squad car and handcuffed? Or be chided with a mere, “Ma’am, get back inside your dwelling, please, and stay there until further notice.”

At least if he came after me like Gort on Patricia Neal, there were no folding chairs in the driveway for me to stumble over and get tangled up in, and no conveniently placed partition for me to trap myself against, instead of just dodging around it and running like hell.

I didn’t want to go out the front door for fear the overexcited beagles would shoot past me and escape. So I turned on all the exterior lights and came out through the garage.

Fortunately, he turned out to be more like Klaatu than Gort.

He met me in the driveway, and politely explained. A neighbor called to complain of a barking dog. I’d heard this same dog several houses over as I fell asleep. But the neighbor seemed to think it was coming from my house. My dogs had been inside all evening, and only started barking when the cop showed up. After determining there was no barking dog outside my house, he’d moved on to see if he could find it elsewhere in the neighborhood, but by that time the owner had apparently wised up and brought his yappy little mutt inside.

The cop then returned to my address to make his report that the complaint was unfounded and our house appeared secure. He remarked that my dogs were actually doing their job very well, and apologized for scaring the bejabbers out of me. He was very nice and professional, and I’m just relieved that my initial fears were as unfounded as the neighbor’s complaint.

Plus, this gave me something to be grateful for on Thanksgiving.

Baby Bear Wrecks a Laptop

2009-11-12T09:56:00.002-05:00

That’s the bad news. The good news: It wasn’t mine.

Mr. Lucky likes to put his laptop on a folding tray in front of the sofa in the family room. This allows him to simultaneously watch TV and play Lord Master of the Universal Planetary Federation of Civilizations, Empires, and Neighborhood Associations, or whatever that game is that allows him to annihilate the inhabitants of entire galaxies for the resources to build his own shopping mall and theme park.

Except when he’s asleep or at work, he leaves the laptop yawning like a crocodile at all times.

I’ve warned him not to do it, especially if Baby Bear is on the prowl. Anytime Mr. Lucky turns his back on the open laptop, even for a few moments, Baby Bear swoops down and slaps it shut.

That’s all. He closes it and moves on to the next shiny object. That may not seem like a big deal, but on rare occasions, he’s been known to wreak havoc by the simple act of hitting a few random keys, and once he even toppled the tray table and open laptop to the floor, fortunately without consequences.

But it was only a matter of time before certain odds and laws dictated those consequences.

The other night, we sat down to dinner. While Baby Bear is more than willing to pull up a chair and join us, we have a hard time getting him to remain at the table until meal’s end. He always finds a reason to get up more than once during dinner to do something else, even if it’s to close a gaping laptop, which is exactly what he did in this case.

One of the things I like about my own laptop is that I don’t need a mouse. I just use the fingerpad. I find it liberating, especially as the mouse is one less thing for Baby Bear to steal and bury at the bottom of his toybox like a dog with a bone. I know because I’ve had to go on in-house archeological expeditions for his own mouse.

But Mr. Lucky, tool of the mouse industry, insists on having one. And on this day, he left it sitting on the keyboard.

Baby Bear did not remove the mouse; most likely he did not even notice it. All he saw was a wide open laptop, and that would not do. He slammed down the lid. Mr. Lucky yelled. Baby Bear returned to the table to resume dining. Mr. Lucky ran to the laptop, and opened it to discover one corner of the screen was smashed.

He didn’t think the kid would do it. He thought the laptop would be safe, since he could see it from where he sat at the table. He was positive Baby Bear wouldn’t touch it as long as he was watching.

Men. You just can’t warn them and tell them you’re right. They always have to find out for themselves—and it’s always the hard, expensive way that usually leads to a repair shop, the insurance company, an emergency room, or any combination of the three. It’s that Y chromosome.

But until he can get the screen fixed, he’s compelled to do what I had to do when my screen burned out earlier this year: He’s back to the desktop in his office.

Only now he can’t watch TV at the same time—unless he can figure out a way to make the whole setup fit on that folding tray table, or move the TV into his office.

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Sluts

2009-11-03T14:46:00.010-05:00

A scene in the movie Apollo 13 portrays an astronaut’s wife arguing with her teenage daughter over her Halloween costume. The girl wanted to go trick-or-treating dressed as a hippie, over her mother’s dead body. Even considering the time period of 1969, and from a standpoint of modesty, I for one could find nothing objectionable about the costume, despite the loudmouthed kid sister’s exaggerated observation that, “She’s not even wearing a bra, you can see EVERYTHING!”

I wish that mother could’ve seen what knocked on my door this last Saturday night: Two girls who couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, thirteen tops, identically dressed as sexy barmaids. They wore white, low cut blouses with puffy sleeves off the shoulder, tightly laced bodices, and ruffled mini-skirts that stuck out like open umbrellas. The only things missing were fistfuls of foaming beer steins and some accordion-playing Chippendales in lederhosen.

I waited for them to chorus, “We’re from the escort service,” at which point I would’ve told them they had the wrong house, or demanded an explanation from my twenty-one year old son who stood next to me enjoying the sights. Instead, they chimed, “Trick or treat!”

But even that could’ve been taken the wrong way with the wrong person.

I don’t have the sort of confrontational personality that might have spurred me to ask, “Do your mothers know you’re dressed like that, or did you start out wearing these under the Mrs. Danvers and second Mrs. De Winter costumes that you doffed and ditched as soon as you got to the next block?”

I looked up the barmaid costumes online. I found many remarkably similar to what these girls wore, all very expensive, and sold alongside a wide variety of other adult costumes that—call me an old-fashioned stick in the you-know-where—do not belong on the bodies of young teenage girls. Especially after dark. Let alone on the street.

I’d rather see my daughter go out as a hippie. But only on Halloween.

Lady, Are You Dumb or Just Stupid?

2009-10-29T12:31:00.003-04:00

You didn’t notice me as you walked by me on your way into the convenience store the other day. In fact, you didn’t seem to notice anything.

I, on the other hand, noticed a lot about you, and I’m still astounded, or I wouldn’t be blogging about it two days later.

For starters, you were well dressed—better dressed than I was, but you were probably stopping en route to work or class, while I was merely slumming with Mr. Lucky. And you had a very nice car. I can’t remember the make (and nowadays most cars look alike to me), but it was a gleaming silver sedan that appeared to be a few years old, as well kept up as its driver.

You parked it next to the passenger side of our vehicle as I stepped out of the convenience store with my pumpkin cappuccino (available for a limited time only). Mr. Lucky held the door for you, and you didn’t even thank him.

I noticed several things as I stepped between your car and mine: Your window was down. Your stereo was playing. Your engine was running.

You had no other passengers, not even a yappy little dog or a great big slobbering dog with head and tongue both hanging out the window. I’m glad I didn’t see a baby.

But you left your purse wide open—as in unsnapped and unzipped with contents visible—on the passenger seat.

Maybe you took your money with you into the store. Or maybe you took just enough to buy your own pumpkin cappuccino. (Only 99 cents in those little “Domo” cups, and I just noticed for the first time ever that there is no cent sign on my keyboard. Didn’t it used to be above the 6?)

How easy it would’ve been for me to reach inside your car and grab that purse. What fun I could’ve had with your credit cards! And making long distance crank calls on your cell phone.

For that matter, I could’ve just hopped behind the wheel of your car and taken it for a joyride—as long as it was automatic transmission. Had it been a stick, chances are good you would’ve caught me before I could figure out how to back out of that parking space without crashing through the glass doors of the store. (I’m totally clueless when it comes to manual transmission.)

Did you think it would be safe to do this because it was broad daylight, it’s not all that bad a neighborhood, and the place—A CONVENIENCE STORE!—wasn’t all that crowded at three in the afternoon? Or do you do this all the time, even after dark?

Or were you taking part in one of those hidden camera shows, and this was an experiment to see what someone like me would do?

Nah. I think you’re just a fool and you’re pushing your luck. Besides, that sort of thing could never happen to you. “I’ll only be a minute, and I can see my car from inside the store the whole time.”

But someone who knows what they’re doing—someone besides me—can take your purse or even the whole car, and be gone before you can drop your partially filled Slurpee in mid-slush and dash back out the door—especially if Mr. Lucky’s no longer there to hold it open for you.

Oh, well. Someday you’ll learn. I just wish you’d learn from reading this blog.

Am I Trapped in a Pac-Man Game, or a Bald Convention?

2009-10-22T15:37:00.011-04:00

When I married Mr. Lucky twenty-two years ago, he had a full head of thick chestnut hair that started disappearing at about the same moment I tossed the bridal bouquet over my shoulder and into the hands of my already wedded brother-in-law.

Call it hereditary male pattern baldness or an unfortunate side effect of living with me and putting up with all my nonsense, but the fact remains he is quite bald today, even to shaving off what little he has left. In fact, I’m not even sure what he’d have left if he just left everything alone.

Baldness seems to be all the rage these days, and that caused a problem for me earlier this week.

After putting Baby Bear on the school bus, Mr. Lucky and I drove out to MacDill Air Force Base to shop at the exchange store. We hadn’t been out there in probably six months, and were dismayed the find it undergoing heavy renovations. The store was very much open for business as usual, but everything had been switched around and packed close together to make room for the renovation work, leaving aisles half as wide (or should I say narrow) as they were originally.

It was almost impossible to move in that place, especially with a shopping cart. Everyone had to travel in the same direction through any given aisle, or be trapped. It was like being inside a Pac-Man game: We’d turn into one aisle, only to run into a group of spooks coming in the opposite direction. We could either stand our ground and get chewed up, or we could try and back out, only to run into a rogue spook sneaking up behind us and then it’s Game Over.

Before we even had the chance to put a single item in the cart, we made the mistake of leaving it parked at the end of an aisle to make it easier to search and recover what we wanted off the shelves. Mr. Lucky was about to come out with several bags of Halloween candy and place them in the cart when a little old lady swiftly dropped her purse into the baby seat and seized control of it.

Though his arms were full, Mr. Lucky wasn’t about to say, “Excuse me, lady, but that’s my cart you just appropriated.” Old-fashioned gentleman that he is, he let her go (not that she was going to get very far in that crowded rat maze), and I returned to the front of the store to fetch another cart.

But then I couldn’t find my husband. No matter which aisle I went down, everyone else was moving in the opposite direction. At intersections I collided several times with the very same people. Finally I spotted a bald head over in the electronics department. But of course—where else would he be?

I zigged up one aisle and zagged down another to get to him; there was no other way to catch up to him. I finally pushed the cart alongside him and—“You’re not my husband.”

Well, from the back that bald head looked just like him. Mr. Lucky did say he wanted to look at shoes, so I burrowed my way to the shoe department.

Then I heard what sounded like a harmonica. Mr. Lucky enjoys playing his harmonica, but I didn’t know he’d brought it with him. Could he be trying to summon me, without yelling my name? (Only he usually whistles or makes a cricket noise.) Indeed, the sound came from the back of a bald head several aisles over. I pushed the cart that way and—“You’re not playing the harmonica.”

Nor was he my husband. It was yet another bald guy turning a tie rack that creaked with a sound very much like a harmonica.

I felt like I was in a scene eerily similar to one in the Hitchcock movie, North by Northwest, where the cops ran all over the train station grabbing and spinning around dozens of red capped porters in hopes of busting the one most closely resembling Cary Grant; or Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Indy toppling one basket after another in a frantic, futile search for the kidnapped Marion.

Me, I was slithering up to every bald guy I glimpsed as if I were planning to hit on him. I swear every man in the store was as smoothly bald as the aforementioned Pac-Man. The base exchange is always throwing “appreciation days” for the Military, or the Military Spouse, or the Military Family, or the Military Retiree. Did we happen to come here on Military Bald Guy Appreciation Day?

It didn’t help I couldn’t remember what color shirt my husband was wearing. In the end, he found me, as I stuck out more—something to do with being five foot eleven topped with long dark hair.

It could’ve been worse. We could’ve been chasing Baby Bear through this labyrinth—though he might have been easier to pin down. Just follow the thuds, crashes, and shattering of glass right before the alarms start shrieking and the sprinklers commence spraying.

About That Balloon Boy: A Grieving Mother's Perspective

2009-10-18T17:01:00.004-04:00

First, let me say I am beyond relieved and grateful to God that little boy was never in that balloon.

But it now appears the whole thing was a hoax, staged for a publicity stunt.

If that is true, then this boy’s father clearly has no clue what he did to millions of parents who have lost a child, whether through illness or accident or abduction, or that split second of distraction when a child wanders off, perhaps never to be found again . . . or found, but not alive. We’re all familiar with the old fable about crying wolf. Perhaps, when a child goes missing in the future, people are more apt to wonder if it’s another hoax. Precious moments may be wasted trying to discount that possibility before real action is taken, putting an innocent child in deeper, potentially irreversible danger. I hope to God I’m wrong about that—and as a chronic world class worrywart, there’s nothing I love more than to be wrong about something.

But this man did something else: He tore open the wounds of grieving parents all across the country who saw this story on TV, and were brutally reminded of the indescribable horror that comes with losing a child forever, sometimes in circumstances the parents can barely stand to think about—but must live with for the remainder of their lives.

I’m one of those bereaved parents. And to make matters worse, this hullaballoon took place on the anniversary of my daughter’s death. I heard it on the radio as I drove to the grocery store, and the tears started flowing almost immediately. I thought not only of Fiona, but of how easily something like this runaway balloon could happen to my fast and fearless Baby Bear who is autistic and can’t even talk.

I’m at least grateful that Fiona, who succumbed to complications from a rare autoimmune polyglandular disease, died at home surrounded by those who loved her most. But what if my precious Bear ever slipped away from me in the wink of an eye, and fell into a terrifying situation where he had no escape, no comprehension of what was happening, and no one to help him? It would tear me into so many pieces, I don’t know if I could ever pull myself back together again. It’s precisely because of his special needs and recklessness that I’m so overprotective of him, and can never stop worrying about him or what will become of him if—and someday, when—I’m no longer there.

I came home from the grocery store crying, wondering if they can put a man on the moon, then why can’t they figure out how to rescue someone from a runaway balloon? (I hereby confess: Hot air balloons are pretty, but you couldn’t pay me to ride in one, let alone allow one of my children to go up.) For several hours, my heart that’s been shattered before broke again for a helpless boy I thought was trapped in the balloon—and for the frantic parents. I was unable to function until the announcement he was safe—and what a relief it was!

Every time I see a story about the death or disappearance of a child, I know the hell that child’s parents are going through—a hell I would never wish on my worst enemy—that no grieving parent would ever wish on their worst enemy. It’s a nightmare from which there is no awakening.

And don’t give me any of that “closure” crap. Maybe for the rest of the world, closure comes with the autopsy results, or the funeral, or when a body is found or the killer sent to prison. But for that child’s parents, the doorway to hell always remains wide open, gaping before us as we teeter on the threshold, struggling not to plunge into that dark, bottomless abyss, as we rack our grief-crazed minds to figure out how we are supposed to get through the rest of our lives without ever seeing and holding our beloved child again, never to watch him or her grow up and become what could have been but never will be.

It’s a hell these publicity seekers know nothing about, or they wouldn’t have pulled this stunt.

And it’s a hell I hope they never have to know.

The Arrival of Fiona Season

2009-10-15T12:01:00.004-04:00

Yes, it’s that day again—the one without the cake and candles.

Every year on this day, we take one of those mini-pumpkins to Fiona, and we place it on the narrow ledge around the bottom of her heart-shaped headstone. Thus begins what I call “Fiona Season” which runs from this day until Christmas.

Fiona Season includes not only the best and happiest family holidays, but Fiona’s birthday, which falls on December 20th.

Her brothers have never cared about dressing up in costume for Halloween, but she always did. In fact, she enjoyed wearing costumes more than she liked the trick-or-treating part. On one Halloween I couldn’t even get her to go to anyone’s door for candy. Instead she wanted to just parade around the neighborhood showing off her pink fairy princess costume.

As Halloween 2000 approached, I wondered how we were going to do trick-or-treating in her wheelchair. I asked her if she wanted to be one of the Powerpuff Girls, for she loved Bubbles, Blossom and Buttercup, and since the popularity of those little superheroines was beginning to spike, the costumes were readily available.

But Fiona was adamant. She didn’t want to be one of the Powerpuff Girls. She wanted to be Cleon, a mischievous, giggly little pink fairy. Cleon was just one of numerous cute characters from Fiona’s favorite video game, Bust-A-Move 4:

Cleon is pictured in the lower left-hand corner

One has to give Fiona high marks for originality. Half the girls that year would probably come out as either Bubbles, Blossom or Buttercup, but what kind of girl would have the imagination to go out as the more obscure, but equally playful Cleon?

Fiona Lingefelt.

With only two weeks before Halloween, we were still pondering how to do a Cleon costume when the angels swooped down and took our mischievous, giggly little pink fairy away.

By the time Fiona Season ends, the little pumpkin is starting to go bad, and we toss it into the nearby woods.

In my fanciful thinking, I can’t help hoping that someday, all those little pumpkins will spawn some sort of enchanted pumpkin patch. I have yet to see it.

Or maybe it really is there, but it’s visible to no one but angels and mischievous, giggly little pink fairies.

Today's Border

2009-10-08T09:45:00.004-04:00

The rearranging continues:

I noticed this latest configuration only after putting Baby Bear on the school bus this morning.

A long, boring straight line with only two curves? Oh, this is SO not going to last.

Or Maybe It's Just Another Pile of Dirt

2009-10-02T12:40:00.005-04:00

I swear I didn’t do this on purpose. But after sweeping Baby Bear’s bedroom floor, I couldn’t help noticing the shape of the dirt pile. I honestly thought it looked like a heart. So I photographed it:

Afterward, as I plugged the camera’s USB cable into my laptop, Mr. Lucky happened to come into my office and ask what kind of photos I was about to upload.

“Let me show you,” I said. “I want to see if you see what I saw.”

In due course the photo appeared on my computer screen. Mr. Lucky was not impressed. “Yeah, so? It’s just a bunch of dirt. Slow picture-taking day? Desperate for an interesting subject? Or is it time I called those guys with the white coats and butterfly nets?”

“The shape!” I exclaimed. “Check out the shape of the dust pile. What does that look like to you?”

“Oh, the shape.” He leaned forward for a better look. “Oh, I think I see now. Is that supposed to be Mickey Mouse?”

So much for my fleeting dreams of the millions of people who would flock to my blog from all over the world, to behold this marvel of dust and dirt and debris, and ponder its cosmic significance.

I only know what it doesn’t signify. I do not love housework!

On the other hand, who doesn’t love Mickey Mouse?

Border Wars

2009-09-29T14:25:00.007-04:00

Mr. Lucky mows and trims the lawn. I pull weeds out of the flowerbeds. I hate doing it—in fact, I hate any kind of yard work, for all that I love a beautifully flourishing garden—but it must be done.

A couple of years ago he spiffed up the flowerbed in front of our house, adding a fancy brick border and covering the ground with reddish-brown rocks. He worked very hard on it and I’ve always liked what he did, especially adding the hibiscus and sunny alamanda bushes.

But this last summer, he got it into his head to expand the flowerbed by moving the bricks farther out. You can see from those reddish-brown rocks where the original flowerbed begins and the expansion ends—at least as of today:

Each time he goes outside, he shifts a few bricks around, saying the border either curves too much or not enough. Each time he calls me to come out afterward and admire his latest handiwork while he regales me with a detailed account of what he did.

“I pulled out these two bricks from over here, and put them down over there,” he’ll say. “I don’t want the border to be too straight, I want it to curve a little more, so I removed several bricks from over here and now I don’t know what to do with these leftover bricks.”

Not to worry. The next day, he figures out what to do with the leftover bricks: He uses them to stretch the flowerbed farther out. Again I am summoned to come out and praise his latest stroke of genius.

“But the border is too straight right along here,” he says. “So we’ll have to find some more bricks.”

And the beat goes on. The lawn is gradually becoming part of the flowerbed. In the meantime, he’s expanding the amount of space for weeds to flourish—and for me to pull.

For some reason, the weeds become more obvious on the flowerbed side of the border.

After putting Baby Bear on the school bus this morning, I went out to remove as much as I could. The sprinklers ran last night, so everything was still quite damp, and that’s when I learned something I never knew all these years: Weeds are easier to pull when the ground is wet.

As you can see by the photos, it doesn’t look as if I did much—but it looked a lot worse beforehand, and I filled a 13-gallon plastic bag! The green stuff pictured toward the front of the newly laid border was the lawn until about a week ago, and dollar weeds are already feasting on it:

My back still hurts from doing it. I know I shouldn’t bend over to pull them, and it’s death to squat. I didn’t want to sit on the bricks themselves as they had little ants scurrying all over them, and the last thing I need in my life right now is—well—ants in my pants.

I suppose I should accept that I’m getting old, and invest in some kneepads.

We still haven’t decided what to plant in the newly expanded place. I would like a flowering tree of some sort. He mentioned a birdbath. I like garden statuary (but no gnomes, please). And I love fountains and fish ponds, but we have to keep a few steps ahead of Aquaboy, aka Baby Bear.

I told Mr. Lucky if he keeps shuffling those bricks around and extending that border, before long there won’t be any lawn left for him to mow—just a whole front yard full of weeds for me to pull.

His reply? “That's the idea!”

Beethoven's Turkish March

2009-09-16T15:21:00.002-04:00

Guess who keeps playing it over . . . and over . . . and over . . . on his electronic keyboard?

The keyboard has some sort of function that plays a variety of popular classical tunes, as well as sound effects. The one simulating fireworks is guaranteed to upset the dogs, but fortunately our Bear isn’t as addicted to pops, whistles and explosions as he is to Beethoven’s marcia alla turca.

Earlier this week he was into Pachelbel’s Canon in D, of which I’m very fond, but to my frustration he’d only let the keyboard play the first six notes before he hit the start button again. Still, that’s infinitely preferable to the girl I knew in the Air Force, who woke up half the barracks at three-thirty in the morning by repeatedly playing Dr. Hook’s “When You’re in Love With a Beautiful Woman” on her boom box (thanks to her, I’ve absolutely hated that song ever since); or even the time Mr. Lucky dinged around with a CD and cassette player to make an obnoxious twenty-minute long version of the opening notes from Michael Jackson’s “Bad.”

I have to admit that Beethoven’s Turkish March is a festive, catchy tune, very upbeat and lighthearted. I wouldn’t mind Baby Bear playing it so much, except I find myself bouncing and skipping around the house in time to it. When I was a little girl, my father had it on a record, played by an orchestra, and I loved it because it reminded me of a merry-go-round.

It’s perfect background music for the three-ring circus that is my household.

The Real Baby Bear Comes Back--and Strikes Back

2009-08-23T16:42:00.013-04:00

On my bookshelf is a well worn book club edition of The Second Lady by Irving Wallace, published in 1980. It’s a Cold War political thriller about a KGB plot to abduct the First Lady of the United States and replace her with an almost perfect double in hopes of gleaning a vital piece of classified information from the President.* Needless to say, the imposter made a few blunders that nearly blew her cover and raised a few suspicions among certain members of her staff.

But not the President. A typical husband in the grand American tradition, he didn’t notice anything the least bit different about his wife.

The First Lady’s mother would have known something was amiss—if she weren’t conveniently deceased.

Which brings us to Baby Bear. I recently blogged about his uncharacteristically good behavior this summer. I’ve been wondering if he was replaced with a Second Bear these past two months, only to be switched back last week when Mr. Lucky took our older son up to Georgia to visit his grandparents. Baby Bear suddenly went back to being his old rampaging, pillaging, plundering self. Do I detect a sinister KGB plot, or a mere reaction to his father’s absence?

I wanted our chocolate beagle, Bart, to go to Georgia with them. Mr. Lucky agreed, until the night before his departure when his father called to declare, “No dogs!” Showing no fear of his own wife, Mr. Lucky complied. He was gone four days, leaving me with the Bear, two dogs, and no car. And—perhaps worst of all—no chocolate.

So what went wrong in his absence? An homage to the late Mr. Wallace and The Book of Lists of which he was co-author:

1. Bart is the same dog who balks at going outside when his master is away. I suppose I should be thankful that when he expresses his displeasure, at least he does it on the bathroom rug.

2. Barely an hour after Mr. Lucky left, the remote controller for Baby Bear’s Playstation went kaput and I couldn’t get it to work again, not even after charging it up or with the cable still plugged in. I had to call Mr. Lucky on his cellphone for advice. Well, okay, not so much for advice as to cuss him out for having the temerity to leave me when he should have known the controller would die an hour later. He instructed me to turn off the Playstation, unplug everything, then plug everything back in, and reboot the Playstation, talking me through a convoluted process that reminded me of when they tried to restore power to Jurassic Park and get it back online. And while I didn’t have any velociraptors chewing my arms off, I did have to contend with two barking dogs, one angry, frustrated Bear, and a thunderstorm that caused a sudden power surge, briefly knocking everything out and ending our phone conversation in a burst of static. Mr. Lucky probably thought I slammed the phone down on him in rage, and I wouldn’t have blamed him for making the assumption.

3. Later, the controller decided to work properly again. Then Baby Bear dropped it behind the entertainment center. Retrieving it was a job for Indiana Jones, complete with huge clouds of old dust, falling objects (note to self: next time, remove framed photos from top of entertainment center before venturing behind it), and sights no human has seen for seven hundred years.

4. Baby Bear has rediscovered water. When he isn’t dumping it on himself, he’s The Human Fountain, throwing and spewing it all over the house.

5. He’s figured out how to turn on the shower in his bathroom. The shower makes almost no noise compared to the tub faucet, and he seems to know it. I lost count of how many times I found him sitting in the tub beneath the shower spray. Sometimes he was clothed, sometimes not.

6. He loves to rock back and forth. He rocks hard enough on the family room sofa that he can actually make the sofa itself rock back, and a new hole in the drywall behind it.

7. Mr. Lucky called the next morning from his parents’ house. His father had taken his mother to an appointment, and since he didn’t have a key to their house, he and the Crown Prince would be stuck there for a few hours until the parental units came back. I was hard pressed to commiserate with his dilemma.

8. Not surprisingly, I have 0 words to report at the weekly check-in for the TARA Book Challenge.

9. I had no chocolate.

10. And I still have no chocolate. I AM OWED CHOCOLATE!

*Now why can't I write blurbs that concise for my own books?

Someone Please Stop My Husband

2009-07-17T13:03:00.010-04:00

Mr. Lucky has long dreamed of replacing the carpet between the kitchen and children’s bathroom with something else. Initially he considered ceramic tile to match that in the kitchen and bathroom, but now that his dream is closer to reality (see previous blog entry) he speaks of laminate wood flooring.

I don’t have a problem with this.

He went on to talk of extending the wood flooring to the dining area and family room.

I can’t say as I have a problem with this, either. In fact, I think it might improve the appearance of the family room. And I’m not the one who’s going to have to unhook and dismantle every electronic component in the entertainment center.

He assured me this wouldn’t be done all at once; that we would do first the hallway, then a month or two later, the dining area, followed by the family room. Eventually, he said, he’d like to do the rest of the house.

Now, I do have a problem with this.

“Fine, but not my office,” I said.

“Yes your office,” he countered. “Think of it. No more dog hair, no more odors, and no more stains that have to be soaked up and sponged and worked out over time. All you have to do is wipe them up.”

I just stared at him in horror.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“Problem? Oh, no problem at all. Just that it would mean having to move all my books. Again!”

“Well, of course it would,” he said, with the blithe air of one who knew he would not have to get stuck with that thankless task, since he’d be the one laying the floor. “But it would only be for one day.”

He totally missed the point. The fact remains the books would have to be removed from the shelves, transported to another room along with the bookcases, then transported back and reshelved.

As Betty Boop might say, “No! No! A thousand times, NO!”

Please don’t make me move my books again. If necessary, I’ll start an online petition against it. I’ll stage a sit-in, and go on a housework strike!

So what if he thinks I’m already on day 8,031 of the latter.

Puzzle Time: Find the Hidden Stains in This Granite!

2009-08-12T13:58:00.004-04:00

What I like about my granite counter: It looks clean when it isn’t.

What I don’t like about my granite counter: It looks clean when it isn’t.

I can’t just wipe and walk away as I could with previous kitchen counters. No, I have to turn on every available light, and examine the counter from every possible angle, squatting down till I’m eye level with the surface, to better see the spots I missed. I may have to run my fingertips across the surface as if I’m reading Braille, when in fact I’m scanning for little dried blobs of food stuck to the counter, that require more elbow grease than in the initial routine wipe. Then comes the removal of fingerprints. This is followed by another examination that reveals streaks from the wiping.

What I need—but I don’t think it’s been invented yet—is a handheld “granite counter stain detector.” You wave it just over the surface of the counter and whenever it detects a hidden stain, it beeps. The bigger and gunkier the stain, the louder and quicker the detector beeps.

I’m reminded of something Dolly Parton’s character said in the movie Steel Magnolias: “There is no such thing as natural beauty.” She was referring to how a woman has to put a lot of effort into keeping herself attractive.

I think she could just as easily be referring to a granite countertop.

Portrait of a Blue One-Eyed Mummy

2009-08-03T11:29:00.005-04:00

That's really Baby Bear wrapped in a fitted bed sheet he pulled from the linen closet for an extremely rare midday nap on the living room sofa.

Baby Bear: 56 Days Without Making Me Scream in Horror

2009-08-01T17:11:00.003-04:00

You know how some construction sites come with signs boasting X number of days since an accident? Or maybe you’ve seen that old episode of The Simpsons and the trailer park with a sign crowing Y number of days since the last tornado. I may be tempting fate with this post, but as of today, it’s been 56 days since the last DOBBO, or Disaster Of Baby Bear Origin.

The last DOBBO was on June 6th, when he upended his TV onto the floor so he could use its table as a boost to reach the pull-chain on his ceiling fan.

Not that I’m complaining, but we’re more than halfway through summer vacation and he hasn’t committed any blogworthy atrocities. No floods. No new holes in the drywall. Nothing broken, either on him or around the house. No manager in a pizzeria walking up to me and saying, “Excuse me, ma’am, but is that your son behind the counter throwing calzones at the health inspector?” None of that. And I’ve even cut back on his medication doses!

His typical summer day consists of playing Crash Bandicoot Warped—every day he rips through most levels with minimal loss of life; he knows all the moves and where to jump and pick up gems, what to avoid and how. And yet, he doesn’t use his two thumbs to manipulate the Playstation controller like most mortals. He uses but one hand.

He’s also very much in love with his cordless battery-powered keyboard that we gave him for Christmas. It’s about 37 inches long and so lightweight, he carries it from one room to another. When he’s not playing Crash, he’s playing tunes and rhythms on this keyboard as he rocks back and forth. We use rechargeable batteries in it and I have to charge them up every night after he goes to bed—where he sometimes takes the keyboard to let the rhythm sounds lull him to sleep—because they’re never good for more than a day and if the keyboard dies on him—well, you don’t want to know.

Let us close by knocking on wood.

It's Hurricane Time!

2008-08-17T12:02:00.017-04:00

According to the current projected track as of this writing, Tropical Storm Fay is following a path eerily similar to Hurricane Charley in August 2004. If it holds, we could be seeing some exceedingly nasty weather Tuesday night.

One area where Mr. Lucky and I have never seen eye to eye is the gas tank. I like to fill it up once it gets down to half a tank. He prefers to wait until he has to get out and push. He claims it’s a holdover from when he was an impoverished 19 year old who could only afford a couple bucks’ worth of gas at a time. Funny how this seems to be the only aspect of his youth he still clings to.

When we went out for Sunday donuts this morning, I noticed the fuel gauge showed half a tank, and told Mr. Lucky we should top it off. He disagreed. Half a tank, he said, was plenty.

“You say that now,” I replied, “but after all the driving you’ll be doing between now and Tuesday morning, you’ll be down to ‘E’ in no time. And in the meantime, Fay will strengthen to Category 1 and there’ll be a mass stampede to all the gas stations. You’ll be waiting in line for hours to get gas, and that’s assuming they don’t run out before you finally pull up to the pump. Then the storm will come and knock out all the power. Without power, the gas pumps won’t work. We’ll be stuck with no gas. And I’ll have something new to hold over your head till death do us part. I’ll bring it up every time we have an argument. Do you really want that?”

“You and your melodramatics. You’re caught up in everyone else’s mass hysteria,” he grumbled. “You’ve bought into all the media hype. And I know what you’re about to say, because it's what you always say--that if I’d been here for Hurricane Charley, we’d still be waiting in line for gas.”

At the time of Hurricane Charley in August 2004, we were living in military housing at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, an installation surrounded on three sides by water. Mr. Lucky, however, was deployed, leaving me with two autistic boys ages 15 and 7. Our Chrysler minivan had half a tank of gas when Charley was over Cuba; I filled it up anyway. It was a Wednesday.

I didn’t go anywhere else until Friday morning, when Charley had entered the Gulf of Mexico and had it sights set on the Tampa Bay area. I’d just put the boys on the school bus when Mr. Lucky’s supervisor called (the people in his office kindly checked up on me while he was deployed) to give me a heads-up: The base commander was expected to issue an evacuation order around noon. Most people would not leave until that order was issued, if at all.

For the next hour I paced around the house, watching the weather map of Florida on the TV with the entire Gulf Coast trapped inside “The Cone of Doom”, debating with myself what to do. I could not take my boys to a designated local shelter where there would be crowds of other people and children. The chaos and unfamiliarity of such a place would agitate both boys (see previous blog entry). Torn from their vital routines, they’d be running amok and screaming all over the place and I’d be constantly chasing them down, trying to keep them from running outside, grabbing other people’s food, wrapping themselves in other people’s bedding. They wouldn’t be able to play the video games or watch the DVD’s that make them sit still for more than a few minutes. They wouldn't sleep, even with their meds. And if they didn't sleep, I wouldn't either; and I'd be in even worse shape to keep them from fleeing the shelter or otherwise terrorizing the other shelterees.

They needed to be in a safe place that was familiar, with familiar people who understood them, where the routines and securities of home could be easily replicated.

That place was their paternal grandparents’ house, 200 miles away in Valdosta, Georgia.

The idea of driving that distance with those boys, without Mr. Lucky, was very daunting, but I had to do it. It was obvious from the Cone of Doom that we couldn’t stay at MacDill. In the end I was so knotted with anxiety and dread that I didn’t want to wait until the base commander issued any order. I figured I might as well pack up and get it over with now.

Around 10:30 am, I loaded up the minivan with the boys’ food and meds; their bedding and clothes, and their favorite toys. I locked up the house and left the base. As I did so, I noticed a long, long line of cars winding from one street to another, all waiting to get into the base gas station where I’d filled up the day before yesterday.

I drove to the boys’ school, pulled them out of their respective classes, and by high noon we were on I-75 headed north. The traffic wasn’t too bad; it was typical of an ordinary early Friday afternoon. Baby Bear rocked in his seat the whole time. All was well until we reached the other side of Gainesville and ran into heavy rains from the outermost bands of Tropical Storm Bonnie, that swept into the Panhandle that same day.

I slowed to a crawl as the road disappeared in a curtain of heavy rain. That’s when Baby Bear decided to do his usual Houdini with the seat belt. He took off his clothes and started slithering all through the minivan, digging and tunneling and burrowing like a giant worm. This was very upsetting to the Crown Prince, who yodeled and thrashed in the front seat next to me.

It was almost like that scene in the movie Jurassic Park, where the guy gets trapped inside a vehicle with a dilophosaurus—also in the midst of a tropical storm. Picture me in that same scene, with the vehicle on a busy interstate and two dilophosauruses—complete with spitting!

This went on until I found the next rest stop. I parked, but left the engine running—which in my frazzled state probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but I had this nutty fear that if I turned off the car, it wouldn’t start up again and I’d be stranded with these two boys. I blame it on that ridiculous complex I acquired when our Ford Aerostar broke down in the middle of nowhere in Texas on a Sunday afternoon when everything was closed (again, see previous blog entry).

Do not lock that door, Karen, do not lock that door . . .

After exiting the vehicle, I ran around it in the pouring rain to open the sliding side door, and Baby Bear shot out as if he’d been fired from a cannon. He was nearly naked, wearing only his diaper. I chased him halfway across the parking lot before I finally caught him, and even then I had a hard time keeping a grip on him—he was slippery not only from the rain, but from the perspiration he’d generated from over two hours of rocking. Once I got him back into the minivan, I didn’t even bother putting his clothes back on—I just wanted to get him buckled back in and get the heck back on the road. I strapped him in with two seat belts, wrapping them around him and looping them over and under each other every which way to make him work for another escape. We resumed our journey. He stayed put until we arrived in Valdosta around 4 pm. The evening news showed traffic leaving Tampa and St. Petersburg almost at a standstill.

I don’t know how I did it, but I did it. And I’m glad now that I did it. But I hope I never have to do it again.

Charley made landfall about 24 hours after we arrived in Georgia. Until a couple of hours prior, it was expected to hit Tampa/St. Petersburg, but changed course and hit Port Charlotte instead.

Fast forward to this morning’s donut run. After picking up the donuts, Mr. Lucky turned into the gas station, which was a little more congested than usual. (I wonder why?)

Was he caught up in everyone else’s mass hysteria? Had he bought into all the media hype? No, he just wanted to shut me up, God bless him.

For tranquil is the life of the husband, and wise is he who appeases his wife with the affirmation that she is always right.

Rakehell: It's Not Just a Term for Regency Romance Heroes

2008-09-22T08:50:00.005-04:00

Fall is here, which doesn’t mean a lot in Florida. I miss the season—the crispness in the air, the changing colors, the anticipation of the holidays and the smell of baking pies instead of barbecue.

One thing I don’t miss is raking leaves, which I had to do every Monday when we were stationed in California, and lived in military housing. On Tuesday, civil servants from the base housing office would inspect everyone’s yards to make sure they were keeping it up to military standards.

We had only one tree in the front yard, yet on a typical fall Monday, after filling half a dozen black garbage bags, there were still leaves carpeting the yard. It seemed for every hundred I raked up, five hundred more dropped out of that tree.

When I awoke the next morning and glanced out the window, I had to wonder if some prankster had emptied every single last one of those garbage bags onto my lawn, because the yard looked as if it hadn’t been raked all year. But the long row of bulging black bags still sat along the curb, waiting for garbage pickup like a group of squat commuters lining up for their city bus connection.

So after breakfast I went back out, rake in hand. An occasional gust rustled the tree branches over my head, blowing another future bagful of leaves to the ground. I felt like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, only I was battling leaves instead of hordes of walking brooms hauling buckets of water. I’d filled up three more bags when, with sinking heart, I spotted the yard inspector approaching with his clipboard.

“Morning,” he said curtly. “You know you’re supposed to have those leaves raked up in time for inspection?”

“I did. I had them all raked up yesterday afternoon, and more of them blew down during the night.”

The inspector wasn’t buying it. He plucked a pen out of his pocket and began scribbling on his clipboard. “I’ll have to write you up. Base regulations specifically state the yard must be in inspection order by 0730 hours every Tuesday. None of your neighbors have leaves in their yards.”

He was right. All the neighbors had trees in their yards, yet there wasn’t a single leaf in any of them. Certainly there were browning leaves still clinging to the branches of the neighbors’ trees, but with each gust of autumn wind, the dying leaves fluttered frantically across the street before they finally made a forlorn landing amongst the leaves from my own tree.

I’ve heard tales of a mysterious place deep in the sea, where whales go to cock their fins up. If you found the place, you’d see nothing but giant whalebones everywhere. I’ve also heard of a similar, equally remote place for elephants. The front lawn of our house in California must’ve been the officially designated “bone yard” for dying foliage.

No matter which way the wind blew—east, west, north, south—everyone else’s leaves rolled into my yard—and stayed put. I wondered if there was some sort of magnetic field in my yard, a weird geological anomaly that sucked in not only leaves, but other debris, to include everyone else’s litter. Maybe it explained why the neighbors’ kids practically lived in our yard instead of playing in their own.

At one point I watched a plastic bag go billowing and bouncing down the street, occasionally hopping into one yard and then another before returning to the street, until it finally fluttered to a halt in the dead center of our yard. And wouldn’t you know it, that bag refused to budge thereafter. In frustration I picked it up and dropped it into the middle of the neighbor’s yard. It rolled right back, doggedly following me like The Red Balloon.

In desperation I started beating it with the rake in hopes it would flee in terror down the street to the next county. But instead it only lay there, inert, submissive, a doormat and a glutton for punishment, rather like yours truly used to be.

Every time the yard inspector wrote us up for something, I wanted to see what his yard looked like.

Oh, and right after I finished writing this, I had to get up and go into the living room to stop Baby Bear from using my sofa as a trampoline. As I replaced all the cushions and pillows on the sofa, he went into my office and added the following message to this blog entry:

Hhghggggggggg,

I Confess: I Don't Like Halloween

2008-10-27T12:29:00.006-04:00

The only thing I like about Halloween is that it marks the start of my favorite time of year. I love the late fall—for what it’s worth in Florida—and I’ve always been more of a Thanksgiving and Christmas girl.

I didn’t mind Halloween when we were in the military and lived on base, because the trick-or-treating there was very tightly controlled, allowed only during a two hour window. They never allowed it to run late enough that with each passing hour, the trick-or-treaters grew bigger and older and even scarier than me.

With the two hour limit on the Air Force base, I usually didn’t have to worry about running out of candy, but still I couldn’t resist rationing the stuff. “Here’s a Tootsie Roll for you, a Hershey’s Kiss for you, and for you I have a lollipop. See you next year!” One year, after I dropped a single piece of candy into a teenage girl’s pillowcase, she mouthed off at me with, “Wow! One whole piece of candy! Whoo-pee!” Since I didn’t wake up the next morning to find the car egged and toilet-papered, I felt I got off lightly.

And then there was the little girl who came to the door with her mother, who was pushing a baby in a baby stroller. The girl had her own pumpkin bucket, and another sat on the hood of the stroller. After I dropped the candy into her pumpkin bucket, she said, “You have to give some to the baby, too!”

What a scam! That baby wasn’t even teething yet, and by the time he was old enough to eat the candy, it’d be well past its expiration date. At the time, my oldest son and daughter were toddlers and not old enough for trick-or-treating, while Mr. Lucky was in the living room, slouched on the sofa with the remote control clenched in his hand. He didn’t have to do anything except wait for the two hour limit to expire, so he could eat whatever was left over.

The mother stood behind the stroller, staring me down and daring me to challenge her in front of her children. Back in those days, I was still a doormat, and since this was military housing, for all I knew her husband outranked mine. Without a word I dropped the candy into the pumpkin bucket on the stroller hood, biting my tongue to keep from saying, “Tell your husband he’s welcome.”

Indeed, when I closed the door, I told Mr. Lucky about the little girl telling me to give candy to her newborn sibling, and he said, “Ha! No way it’s for the baby—it’s for their dad. Trust me, he’s sitting at home in front of the TV this very moment, waiting to collect his share.”

Just like Mr. Lucky.

Call me neurotic; I know my insistence on rationing the candy is downright irrational. I tell myself I’m only trying to make it last, so everyone who rings the bell will get something. But no matter how much we stockpile, I always worry about running out after twenty minutes. Mind you, I'm also the same person who thinks half a tank of gas is as good as empty.

Mr. Lucky, on the other hand, will lavish the trick-or-treaters with giant fistfuls of sweets, like a returning conqueror flinging spoils to the cheering masses as he rides by in his chariot. He also believes in holding back at least one bag of candy for himself.

One year I did give a few extra pieces to a little girl simply because I thought her costume was so original and amusing. She wore a pair of goggles and an empty toilet paper roll attached to her nose. When I asked what she was supposed to be, she replied, “I’m an aardvark!”

Kids, that’s how you get more candy from grumpy, tight-fisted Mrs. Lingefelt.

I don’t understand myself. You’d think I’d be more excited about this whole business of dressing up in freaky outfits, scaring the hell out of people and shaking them down for chocolate.

After all, it’s what I do every day.

L is for Lingefelt in a Long Line

2008-11-09T14:08:00.003-05:00

This last Tuesday, I spent forty-five minutes in line waiting to vote. Every so often, a poll worker would come out and ask if anyone’s name started with A or G or P, etc. Not surprisingly, they never asked for anyone with an L. I brought along a book to read (The Butler Did It by Kasey Michaels, one I’ve read before; hilarious and highly recommended), and was thankful I didn’t get stuck between two people who happened to be, as they say in Regency England, bosom bows.

I’m reminded of our days in the military, where a lot of time is spent waiting in line for one reason or another, especially at the base commissary where we shop for groceries. We can’t pick any old checkout the way we can at civilian grocery stores. Instead, the commissary uses ropes and posts like the ones at the bank, to create a maze and make lab mice out of us.

Fairness aside, I don’t care for this method of lining up commissary patrons for at least two reasons. In the first place, I usually get stuck between two people, one in front of me and one behind, who happen to be intimate lifelong friends. This happens every time I go to the bank, too. They talk to each other—loudly—and usually about a mutual acquaintance (she couldn’t be a friend—not with friends like these) who isn’t there to take offense at having her gynecological problems broadcast in such gory detail in so public a forum.

It’s very confusing. The lady in front of me appears to be looking at me, when she’s really looking at the person behind me. I have to try and act like I’m not eavesdropping, yet I know the two of them are hoping I’ll become so uncomfortable with their graphic discussion about their hapless subject’s hysterectomy, that I’ll tell the lady behind me to go ahead of me so I won’t be caught in the middle.

Does the woman in front ever offer to let me go ahead, so she can have an unobstructed view of her pal while they continue to foam at their respective mouths over the size of the absent third party’s uterine fibroids? Of course not. Do I ever have the backbone to ask the woman in front of me if I can please go ahead of her? Of course not. I’m Karen Lingefelt.

That, or the two people are long lost friends or lovers who, after—why, it’s been years!—of separation, are reunited right there in line and spend the whole time catching up with each other’s life stories that never seem to include anything I might incorporate into my next novel. Sometimes the line is long enough that if they can find a notary waiting a turn, I might get to be a witness at their on-the-spot wedding.

The second thing I don’t like about the commissary maze is that I’m denied the freedom to choose who I want to wait behind. I’d rather take the checkout with the man holding the armful of junk food for his football game or Star Trek marathon, than the one with the woman my mother’s age, whose grocery cart looks as if she’s planning to entertain the entire Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. She does everything slowly and painstakingly, as if she’s performing open heart surgery on a butterfly.

All patrons are required to present their military ID cards at the cash register. This has always been the rule all over the world, for the three decades I’ve been part of the military. So you’d think after all these years, a military veteran/spouse older than me would know by now to have her ID card ready; but no, she always waits for the cashier to request it, at which point she embarks on a full scale expedition to the bottom of her purse to excavate it. Ditto the coupons and the checkbook, unless she’s paying cash and then it’s usually in coins and small bills, or really really big bills that can’t be changed unless the cashier can find a supervisor with access to the safe.

Even after she’s finally managed to pay, she refuses to move forward until she’s balanced her checkbook and conducted a major audit of her five foot long sales slip, interrupting the cashier while she’s trying to ring up my groceries to question a suspected discrepancy. If the cashier did make a mistake ringing up her groceries, maybe it’s because the customer before her was still hovering around interrupting her with similar trifles. Many’s the time my own full cart has been rung up, and I can’t swipe my ATM card or punch my PIN into the keypad, because the woman who was originally in front of me is still standing there trying to reorganize her purse so as to honor her ID card with a proper reburial.

Next time: What happens—or more accurately, doesn’t happen—at the head of the commissary maze.

L is for Lemmings Locked in Line

2008-11-13T13:58:00.014-05:00

If you’ve ever seen any of those old disaster flicks from the 1970’s—think Airport or The Towering Inferno, or in the case of Baby Bear, whose catastrophes usually include water, The Poseidon Adventure—then you have an idea of what it’s like taking all three of my autistic children grocery shopping: Each person has his or her own subplot or drama that intertwines with the others’, all spiraling through a seemingly endless trail of destruction.

Naturally I prefer to go grocery shopping when they’re in school. During the summer months, if Mr. Lucky was deployed somewhere, I would stock up on—nay, horde as many groceries as I could fit into the pantry and refrigerator (one of those big freezers out in the garage would have been nice), simply to minimize trips to the Air Force commissary. But they couldn’t be avoided altogether.

In such cases, we’d go first thing in the morning, right when the commissary opened and it wouldn’t be as crowded. More often than not, it’s very crowded; I’ve since found that Wal-Mart on a Saturday afternoon is like the base commissary on any day of the week.

Aggravating matters is what happens—or doesn’t happen—at the head of the maze (described in previous blog entry) leading to the cash registers.

A supervisor will stand at the head of the line, watching for when one of the registers is ready for another customer. She will then direct the person at the head of the line to that particular checkout.

“Number Eight is open,” she says, and he pushes his loaded cart to Checkout Number Eight.

A few minutes later, the customer at Checkout Number Twelve places the last of her groceries on the rolling belt, and pushes her cart forward to the opposite end of the checkout.

“Number Twelve,” the supervisor will say to the next person in the maze line.

This does nothing to speed up the checkout process. The result is that over the years, many susceptible commissary patrons have been brainwashed, like religious cult recruits or Manchurian candidates, into never leaving the maze for an open checkout until they’ve been directed to do so by the supervisor.

The problem worsens when the supervisor finds something more worthwhile to do in another part of the commissary. The whole winding line screeches to a dead halt, like that scene in the Disney/Pixar cartoon, A Bug’s Life, where a leaf flutters to the ground in the middle of a column of busy marching ants, disrupting the column and effectively splitting it into two. The ant who suddenly finds himself at the head of the newly broken second line is paralyzed with panic, and doesn’t know what to do until a senior ant happens by and guides him around the leaf, until he can link up with the end of the first line, and the bug’s life returns to normal.

Every time I go to the commissary I get stuck behind two such bugs, usually an older couple—we’ll call them Ike and Mamie—part of the extensive retired military community which, at our local base, far outnumber active duty personnel.

No sooner do Ike and Mamie reach the head of the maze than the supervisor is called away to deal with some other, more earth-shattering crisis—someone’s can of cat food won’t scan properly and the cashier can’t punch in the price manually unless both she and the supervisor insert their keys into the register and turn at the same time, like the launching of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Ike and Mamie are left puzzled and totally bereft of initiative.

“I don’t see her anywhere,” says Ike. “Yet there are at least three checkouts that look open.”

Then pick one! I silently seethe.

“I don’t know, dear,” Mamie dithers. “I’m worried about the Rocky Road melting.”

Then get your Rocky Road to the nearest available checkout! I want to yell. Meanwhile, the line has grown out of the maze, and is stretching all the way back to the deli. “Excuse me,” I say, “but what do you think would happen if you went ahead to that checkout anyway?”

Ike strokes his chin. “I don’t know.”

Mamie shudders. “I’m not sure I want to find out.”

“My kids are about to start World War Three,” I say. “Do you mind if I go around you and risk making a mad dash for it?”

Mamie grabs Ike’s arm. “Don’t let her do it.”

He sternly shakes his head at me. “If you were a young single fellow with no one waiting for you back home, I might tell you to take your chances. But you’re a woman. With children. I can’t in all good conscience allow it.”

You’d think there were watchtowers manned with searchlights and armed guards, ready to shoot and kill anyone who dares to make a run for the nearest available register without the blessing of the supervisor lady. This is the United States of America, and most of the commissary patrons have risked life and limb for the freedom to fill their carts with groceries and proceed to the checkout of their choice. Yet here they all stand like frozen lemmings.

Meanwhile, I have to keep the Crown Prince and Baby Bear from breaking out of the maze and racing each other to the nearest door marked “EMERGENCY EXIT – DO NOT OPEN – ALARM WILL SOUND - WE ARE NOT KIDDING - YOU WILL BE IN BIG TROUBLE IF YOU PUSH IT!”

But what child of mine can resist?

Once my darlings do succeed in setting off the alarm, it gets everyone moving—except Ike and Mamie, who don’t want to lose their place at the head of the maze. As the sirens wail amid flashing red and orange lights, I duck beneath the cart expecting to hear machine-gun fire and explosions, and the voice of Alan Rickman booming over the P.A. system, “T minus thirty seconds and counting.” The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could gallop by through a shower of blazing meteors, reduce everything to a smoldering ruin of ashes beneath a sky choked with obsidian thunderclouds, and I swear Ike and Mamie would still be standing there, wondering if the supervisor lady will return anytime soon to direct them to a checkout, and fretting over the fate of their melting Rocky Road.

Call this my third argument for wanting to pick my own checkout, instead of getting clogged up in the maze.

More recently, the supervisor lady has been replaced by a huge, high-tech device that hangs over the head of the maze. It flashes the number of the next available checkout, and a voice (not Alan Rickman’s) announces, “Next, please!” It strikes me as being very Big Brotherish, and I don't think it makes the line move any faster. People still must be told when they can proceed to the next available checkout.

At least we don’t have to worry about it wandering off like the supervisor lady and my children.

Another Day, Another Flood . . . Another Drink, Please

2009-07-03T15:00:00.011-04:00

Last week I found a wet spot on the carpet, in the hallway leading from Bear Country to the kitchen. I chalked it up to a certain boy dumping cups of water onto the floor, and laid a towel over it.

Yet the spot wouldn’t go away. Or it would dry up the next day, then mysteriously appear again, usually in the evenings. Was it possible Aquaboy was pouring water in the exact same spot at about the same time every day? Mr. Lucky and I agreed this was quite likely; it was just a matter of catching him but we never did. Then I made a horrifying discovery yesterday morning, after nearly a week of drenching rain over the Sunshine State.

The wet spot had grown and spread—or actually, the spot had spread from an even larger splotch in the adjacent linen closet. I didn’t see it at first because I had about a hundred old worn out bed sheets stacked on the floor of the linen closet. That’s right, I never throw out old sheets because of some nutty idea I have that I might find another use for them one day.

I alerted Mr. Lucky and told him we had a serious problem. He’s been wanting to replace the hallway carpet with tile, and now that he had a good excuse, he promptly ripped up the carpet and padding beneath. Neither of us could find the source of the leak anywhere.

There was no way Baby Bear could have dumped that much water, only to have it soak straight through the carpet to the foundation and underneath all those sheets on the closet floor. The water would have had to show up on the kitchen floor, too, and surely I would have noticed it when I slipped and went flying onto my tush.

No, this was caused by something else, something infinitely more sinister, and what with all the rain we’d had lately, horrible visions filled my head—of plumbing doctors coming to the house with their fancy diagnostic equipment to detect leaks that can’t be seen with the naked eye. Of some guy in a hardhat taking a jackhammer to my floor to reach the pipes underneath, and of water spewing up through my roof like a geyser. Of a sinkhole forming beneath the house, threatening to suck our entire home and everything in it into the muddy bowels of the earth.

Worst of all, of having to move all my books YET AGAIN!

It only took about five minutes for me to become thoroughly freaked out, while Mr. Lucky counseled patience as the floor dried and he watched to see if the water returned.

Sure enough, it did after dinner last night. And he traced the water to this source:

A perfectly harmless canine water cooler

I’d filled it for the dogs about an hour before the water showed up in the linen closet again. It had a crack I never saw when filling it. The water just couldn’t flow across the kitchen floor where I’d be most likely to spot the problem right away, now could it? Oh no, instead it had to seep behind that knotty wooden object (which holds the garbage), beneath the molding and into the linen closet on the other side.

And here I thought the dogs had been slurping up so much water recently because of the hot summer weather. Lately I’ve been filling it every single night, about every twenty-four hours. Yet I never made the connection between the dogs’ water supply and the mysterious appearance of the water spot in the hallway each evening.

Thank heavens that’s all it was—and for once it wasn’t even an Act of Baby Bear.

We now return to our regularly scheduled insanity in progress.

Why Am I Not Surprised?

2009-06-27T10:07:00.002-04:00

Who Should Paint You: Pablo Picasso

You are an expressive soul who shows many emotions, with many subtleties

Only a master painter could represent your glorious contradictions

What Artist Should Paint Your Portrait?

From the Nosebleed Section

2009-06-14T17:29:00.005-04:00

So I was in my office, sitting at the computer, and I could hear Baby Bear running all over the house, whooping and laughing and evidently enjoying himself. I didn’t hear any crashing or shattering or house-shaking thumps. Finally he galloped into my office. I turned in my swivel chair to see two things on his face: A big smile . . . and blood. It was also splattered on his hands and arms and chest.

I shrieked. He laughed. Fortunately it only took a few seconds for me to ascertain he had a nosebleed and had been wiping at it, hence the horror flick appearance. I took him into the bathroom to ply him with damp washcloths, and called for his dad to look around for bloodstains or any evidence of how the nosebleed might have started. He found none.

Mr. Lucky had been watching TV, and said he hadn’t noticed anything amiss. And I believed him, because anytime I come home after having been out for several hours, the whole house looks as if it’s been pillaged and plundered by barbarians, and he always insists the kids must have done all of it just in the past few minutes, because up to that point he was watching them like a hawk the whole time. Uh huh. He watches them until I pull into the driveway, then he directs his attention elsewhere while my three little darlings gather in a huddle: “Mom just pulled up, so we have to act fast if we want to really make her yell. Sis, you ransack the living room and dining room, and this time, see if you can pull the chandelier low enough to swing it into the curio cabinet. Bro, you do the kitchen, and don’t forget to leave the fridge door open after you spread the leftovers all over the floor. I’ll take the bedrooms and bathroom and see how much stuff I can flush down the toilet before it finally overflows. Good thing we don’t have to worry about the family room, it’s always a wreck.”

It’s like Cat in the Hat in reverse, the part where the goldfish sees their mother's shapely leg out on the sidewalk and they must put everything back in order before she opens the door. I am to believe all this mass destruction took place in the less than single minute it takes me to pull into the driveway, get out of the car, and walk into a house that looks eligible for federal disaster aid, only to find Things One, Two and Three innocently occupied with a Disney cartoon, and Mr. Lucky on the computer playing Sim Galactic Empire or some such.

Fortunately Baby Bear was very cooperative while I stopped his nosebleed and cleaned him up, but of course he ignored my advice to take it easy for a while. I still don’t know what brought it on, and he’s been fine ever since.

But does nothing faze that child?