Today's Border

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

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

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

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

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?

Puzzle Time: Find the Hidden Stains in This Granite!

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

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

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.

Someone Please Stop My Husband

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.

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

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 of the wall.

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.