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.

Why Am I Not Surprised?

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

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?

In Which Baby Bear Shows Off His Problem-Solving Skills

Remember Baby Bear's Ceiling Fan Tetherball, that led to the shortening of the pull chain for his overhead light? Since then, he's taken to batting the pull chain on the ceiling fan in my office, while I've had to use a stepping-stool to turn his bedroom light off without having to turn off the fan.

So guess what happens when he wakes up at seven in the morning--and on a Saturday, too!--and he wants to turn on his light, but he can't reach that two-inch long pull chain under the ceiling fan? He doesn't have a chair or stepping stool handy, and he doesn't want to wake up Mom.

What's a Bear to do? How about this:

The ensuing thunk launched me out of bed, while Mr. Lucky remained sound asleep.

The table is supposed to sit lengthwise parallel to that wall. The 27-inch TV sat atop it. I think the above picture explains what he did in well under a thousand words. And yes, the TV is upside-down, still attached to the DVD player on the table's lower level.

I could not budge it, not even to turn it upright. I had to wait until Mr. Lucky woke up.

The amazing thing is, the TV still works, though the color is way off now. Everything has a purplish-greenish tinge to it.

Time to show off my own problem-solving skills: I suppose we'll have to get a new, longer pull chain for him to bat at and wind around the fan's motor housing. But do I dare leave the stepping stool in his room until then? Or do I use the wall switch to shut off the light and the fan? (I like to keep the air circulating in his room at night.)

Or do we get a TV table on wheels, and roll the TV out of his room at night? We're already doing that with his computer.

Oh, and did I mention we're only two days into summer vacation?

The bright side: Baby Bear isn't hurt.

I'll Believe Anything Except Reality

Recently, I saw the latest film adaptation of the Jules Verne classic, Journey to the Center of the Earth, starring Brendan Fraser. While it didn’t blow me away, I also didn’t feel it was an hour and a half wasted. It was a vast improvement over a made-for-TV version I saw many years ago, that reeked of “pilot for a TV series that was never picked up” and stole two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

WARNING: Movie spoilers ahead, in case you haven’t seen it but it’s your lifelong dream to one day do so.

While I know the whole “Hollow Earth” idea is just a lot of hooey, I still like the idea of a world within a world. I thought it rather cool that they went in by way of Iceland, and came out via Italy. I didn’t question the speed and ease of their long descent, whether T-rex skulls are seaworthy, or if there should have been issues with gravity once they arrived at earth’s center. I was willing to suspend disbelief and go along with the giant fossilized mushrooms, the flat rocks floating in mid-air like an asteroid field, and the glow-in-the-dark birds sent to help the humans in Disneyesque fashion. And what movie about a lost world within our own real world is complete without the usual rampaging dinosaurs?

I was content to swallow every bite of this fantastic buffet of make-believe, except for one little scene in which they stretched things too far even for my wild imagination: Brendan and his leading lady get thrown out of a runaway mine cart and land flat on their backs—only to stand up, dust themselves off, and walk away.

It was one of those moments where I had to shout at the TV, “Oh, come on!” They should have been killed, or at the very least spent the rest of the movie in body casts and traction.

I have a similar reaction to the 2005 version of King Kong. I love that movie. I could believe the idea of a remote island in the farthest reaches of the South Seas, where a tiny civilization of people were forced to build a seaside fortress to protect themselves from the giant predatory beasts roaming the rest of the island. I was sold on the notion of the giant ape, the giant mosquitoes, the giant centipedes, the giant everything. I was willing to overlook the men’s superhuman ability to dodge and outrun the stampeding dinosaurs while toting heavy photographic equipment, though I would’ve just ducked into the nearest nook or cranny and let the beasts pass.

Yes, movie fans, I happily gulped it down, every outrageous morsel, till they returned to New York and Kong got to enjoy a playful, heartwarming few moments sliding around an ice-covered pond with Naomi Watts.

This is Mr. Lucky’s least favorite part of the movie. “Oh, come on!” he yells. “Do you know how thick that ice would have to be—and how deep that pond would have to be for ice that thick—to hold the weight of that ape?”

He does have a point. The ice never so much as cracked beneath the weight of the giant ape. Yet a single volley from an army tank blew it to splinters, and Kong was off and running to the Empire State Building, blonde girl literally in hand.

And that’s where I usually get pulled out of the story. Shouldn’t it be so windy at the top of the Empire State Building, that she can barely stand up? And since it is made quite obvious to the viewer that they’re in New York in the dead of winter, one can only imagine the wind chill factor: Shouldn’t she be freezing to death in that skimpy, sleeveless white gown?

I try to explain that away by assuring myself it must be very warm and cozy clenched inside Kong’s fist. But what about when he puts her down to bat at the planes? Or when he finally falls?

Why am I so willing to accept the more fantastic elements of a story, while yelling, “Oh, come on!” at the more mundane, every day elements—the situations I’m more likely to experience than fleeing dinosaurs or falling almost four thousand miles down a cave in three minutes while carrying on a conversation with my fellow fallers?

One final thought on Journey: As I watched it, I found myself contemplating the idea that Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne were two different writers with two different voices, who each wrote a story with the same basic premise: A human ventures down a hole to find a completely different world.

It must have been those giant mushrooms.

Jasmine, Bees, and a Butterfly

After some much needed rain every day for the past week, my jasmine tree has exploded with blossoms and buzzing bees dancing all around it:

And because of all the rain, the grass is growing and can't be mowed till everything dries out somewhat. But oh, our whole back yard is perfumed with jasmine and it smells wonderful!

In addition to the bees, yesterday I saw what looked like a huge monarch butterfly fluttering near the tree, which made me think of Fiona. A huge fan of The Simpsons, one of her favorite episodes was where Bart told Lisa that he believed when you die, you get to come back as whatever you want. And Bart planned to come back as a butterfly.

When Lisa asked why, he replied, "Because no one ever suspects the butterfly."

Fiona always cracked up at that. And now, every time a butterfly crosses my path, I wonder . . .