Another Week Without My Laptop

My laptop acquired a virus from somewhere. Mr. Lucky tried to remove it without success, and suggested that it might have been (though he also acknowledged it might not have been) prevented had I installed Windows updates.

Every night when I shut the computer down, Windows has updates to install. He said those were different updates, and pointed out a little yellow shield in the lower right corner of the screen. Whenever it shows up, I’m supposed to click on it to install updates. But I hadn’t been doing that, because whenever I shut the computer down each night—

“That doesn’t matter,” he said for tenth time. I still needed to click on that yellow badge.

So the laptop spent nearly a week in the shop being nuked by geeks geekier than my husband. I had no Internet. No contact with the outside world. I tried watching the news channels on TV, but it’s hard to just sit there and try to absorb all that stuff. I can do an hour of the evening news and that’s it. I don’t watch a lot of TV, anyway—it stays off during the day, as I would rather listen to music.

We eventually got the laptop back, but it was still glitchy, so Mr. Lucky decided to install a new hard drive. Last time he did that on a computer of which I was a frequent user (before Baby Bear was born), I lost all the Word documents of all the books I’d written prior to that time, and to this day I only have hard copies of them.

This time, I had everything backed up on the flash drive. Even True Pretenses is still on there.

He spent a whole day working on my computer, even though he had a cold and hadn’t been sleeping well, and I’m now back in business. I felt guilty about the expense, but then I feel guilty about any expense, while he keeps telling me not to worry about it.

I told him he’s a prince, and that I would put in a good word for him. I might even bake him a cake, which must be done this weekend anyway, because one of my other princes, our firstborn Crown Prince, has a birthday on Sunday.

I nearly lost my mind not having a computer for a whole week. No, I take that back—I did lose my mind.

I actually did some housework for a change.

See Baby Bear. See Baby Bear Run. Then See Karen Turn Into a Basket Case.

As our family unit trooped out the front door the other day, Baby Bear did something he hasn’t done in a very long time: He took off running.

Usually he goes straight to the car—actually, for reasons known only to him, he always goes around the back of the car to the other side—and then he gets in the back seat. But on this day, as he walked behind the car, something caught his attention, and he suddenly broke into a run down the street.

Mr. Lucky had just gone back into the house because he forgot something—he always forgets something, either his keys, or his wallet, or his cell phone, or his pants—occasionally the first three items will be in the pockets of the pants, but it’s never the pair he’s wearing. Sometimes I think he forgets his brain, which I suspect he keeps in a jar when not in use, but then he can’t find the jar. Since he even gets lost in the house while looking for stuff, I knew it was up to me to chase down the boy.

Our not-so-baby-anymore Bear is thirteen years old, and seventy-five inches tall. I’m—well, I’m a lot older than thirteen, and seventy-one inches tall. He was wearing athletic shoes. I was wearing sandals. Advantage: Bear.

I yelled his name as he ran down the street in a straight line. He has no sense of danger, and I feared he wouldn’t dodge out of the way of any oncoming vehicle. He thinks it’s fun to crash into me, so why not a Mack truck?

Indeed, there was a truck parked on the street, engine roaring, door wide open. It was a large truck, belonging to a lawn maintenance company that was fertilizing someone’s lawn. This meant loud machinery, hazardous chemicals, big hoses snaking everywhere, and people wielding tools that could easily double as weapons. Baby Bear was dashing headlong into a danger zone.

He rushed straight to the open door of the truck. Oh no, I thought, not again. He’s done this before—he sees a strange vehicle with a wide open door, he dives right in, and refuses to budge until we can get a hostage negotiator with a megaphone to promise him donuts, if only he’ll stop reprogramming the radio stations and redirecting the air vents, and come out.

There was no way I could catch up to him before he reached the truck and leaped into it. I only had to get him out of there before he put it into drive and took it for a joyride, careening down the street, knocking down garbage cans and mailboxes, and dragging behind him whoever was on the other end of the hose attached to that tank in the back end of the truck.

Oh yes, I had the whole ghastly picture in my head already--drawn, painted, signed, and framed, ready to hang on the wall and be admired and contemplated by wine-bibbing aficionados of art and connoisseurs of chaos. Why wait, when I can panic now?

I yelled his name again as he reached the open door and . . . He slammed it shut.

Then he did an about face and calmly walked toward me, oblivious to the workers and their noisy equipment. His own work was done.

The workers only smiled and waved at me, good sports all. Clearly they knew kids like mine.

Baby Bear went back to our car and got in, ready to go.

No hostage negotiations were necessary this time. But he still wanted his donuts.

He got them.

Does My Dog Hate Vivaldi?

Baby Bear has a Yamaha keyboard that plays a wide variety of popular melodies across the music spectrum, from children’s favorites to classical. He seems to have a decided preference for classical music, and has favorite pieces that he’ll make the keyboard repeat over and over until I’m hearing them even when the keyboard is off and he’s asleep. Once it was Beethoven’s Turkish March that was Flavor of the Week. The other day it was Antonio Vivaldi’s “La Primavera” from The Four Seasons suite.

That first allegro evokes images of dancing and skipping through fields of wildflowers, chasing butterflies and rejoicing in the return of spring. It’s bright and happy. Who could possibly object to this masterpiece of baroque?

Our chocolate beagle, Bart, that’s who. Each time Baby Bear activated that first allegro, Bart started whimpering, then baying and howling. This upset our Bear, who communicated his displeasure and desires in his own inimitable fashion by grabbing me, gesturing to the dog, and then gesturing to the door. Translated, “Mom, put that dog outside so I can enjoy Vivaldi in peace.”

Bart was only too happy to go outside. But this got me to thinking: Does he really hate that particular tune? Is there something in it he can hear that no human can, something annoying? Yet the other beagle, Jasper, didn’t seem to be bothered by it.

So after Baby Bear went to school, I thought I’d conduct an experiment. We have Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons on CD, as played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with Seiji Ozawa as conductor and Joseph Silverstein on the violin. It was part of Mr. Lucky’s vast CD collection when we got married way back in 1987. According to the text in the CD insert, Vivaldi also wrote a series of sonnets describing in words what he thought or saw in composing this quartet of famous concertos.

The Spring sonnet includes a reference to a sleeping goatherd’s faithful dog at his side. The second movement of “La Primavera” has repeated notes from the viola that according to the composer, were supposed to represent a barking dog. (At least we’re assured that someone was keeping an eye on those goats.) But it wasn’t this second movement, called a Largo, that upset Bart. It was the first Allegro that disagreed with him.

I played the entire suite on the stereo three times in a row to see what happened with Bart.

First Play: Bart didn’t make a sound. He did, however, head for the back door and wag his tail. Jasper did likewise. Of course, he tends to look up to Bart, but will quickly disavow him and go into hiding anytime he suspects they’re both in trouble. I let them outside, and they came back in during the Autumn movement.

Second Play: Bart was lounging under the coffee table when the dreaded first movement of Spring kicked off. I got up from my chair. He also got up, and wanted to go back outside. He didn’t make a sound. Out he went, and again I let him back in around the autumnal equinox. Jasper slept through it.

Third Play: Upon the return of Spring, Bart was back under the coffee table. This time I remained seated and turned to look at him. He looked back at me. I got up. He didn’t move. Clearly he was bored with my silly experiment.

Could it be he simply found the keyboard rendition annoying? There was only one way to find out. I turned on Baby Bear’s keyboard, found “La Primavera”, and played it.

No reaction from Bart.

I even tried starting it over and over, letting it play for no more than a dozen notes or so each time, just like Bear does. Maybe that was what annoyed Bart. It certainly annoys me.

Still no reaction from Bart. In fact, he was practically snoring under the coffee table.

It’s quite possible he’s desensitized to it by now.

Otherwise, the results of my experiment: Inconclusive. But I did learn a few interesting things about Vivaldi and The Four Seasons that I hadn’t considered before.

Like Father, Like Son

Mr. Lucky likes to watch Netflix movies on his computer, whereas I prefer to watch them on the TV in the family room. I sometimes watch Netflix while he works in the evening. Thanks to its “Recently Viewed” feature that allows us to check up on each other, several days later he’ll remark, “I see you watched (insert movie title here). How’d it look?”

“It looked fine,” I usually say, but what’s fine to me may not be acceptable to him. For as long as we’ve been married, he’s waxed obsessive over widescreen ratios and more recently, high definition. Unless it’s so extremely letterboxed as to resemble the view through Gort’s visor, and so high in definition that it’s 3-D without the kooky glasses, it is unacceptable to him.

So you’d think he’d be more particular than I am about what movies to watch. Not so. Judging from the Netflix viewing history, not only will that man watch just about anything, but I wonder where he finds the time to watch it all.

“Most of those movies I don’t watch all the way through,” he explains. “I only watch them long enough just to see how they look.”

Enter the Bear.

One Saturday while I was at a TARA meeting, Mr. Lucky introduced Baby Bear to the Netflix streaming disc that works off the PS3. He may as well have opened an institutional sized can of Extra Fancy Gourmet Worms in Heavy Syrup.

In terms of quantity, that boy has a viewing history to match his father’s. It’s mostly from the family/children category, but he has a few movies favored for an excess of stuff boys love. He goes nuts over the first third of The Fugitive (as did his older brother before him, who calls the movie, “Bus Train”). In addition to the bus and the train, there are police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, helicopters, and sirens galore. And let’s not forget the thousands and thousands of gallons of lovely water gushing in torrents over a dam, with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones running and yelling and slipping and splashing through ankle deep water while threatening to shoot somebody—just like Mom and Dad once did!

I’ve also seen him play the first few minutes of Die Hard over and over, just to watch the landing of the jet airliner.

One day recently, while I was in my office, Mr. Lucky set up the Netflix in the PS3 to play the movie Up on the TV. Shortly afterward, I heard a ruckus between him and Baby Bear, and I went out to investigate.

“He wants the Playstation controller and the remote, but I hid them,” Mr. Lucky explained. Funny, I used to do that myself—only I wasn’t hiding them from Baby Bear. “He wants to quit the movie and find something else.”

“Are you yourself watching it?” I asked. When he said no, I went on, “Then let him change movies if that’s what he wants.”

Mr. Lucky proceeded to steal my lines. “But that’s all he does. He doesn’t watch anything for more than a few minutes. He’s constantly changing out movies.”

“Oh, you mean sort of like you always do? And how about all your channel surfing? How many times have I had to sit there while you endlessly click-click-click and say, ‘I know I’m driving you crazy, Karen, but I can’t help it, I’m a man and men like to hunt’? Well, guess what? Our little boy is becoming a man—AND HE WANTS TO HUNT!”

I myself may not be a hunter, but my shot hit the mark. Grumbling under his breath, Mr. Lucky surrendered the PS3 controller and remote to Baby Bear, and then returned to the computer in his man-cave.

And thence resumed his own feverish hunting through Netflix.

Bear Hugs and Grumpy Old Men

Yesterday we availed ourselves of our veterans’ benefits with a trip to MacDill Air Force Base, where we shopped for groceries at the commissary. We charged Baby Bear with pushing the grocery cart, but we still have to keep a close eye on him, especially when we get to the end of an aisle, for it is here that he often attempts to make an escape by pushing the cart in one direction, only to let go of it and dash off in the other.

I tend to keep in close physical contact with him at the end of aisles, usually by putting my arm around him. Occasionally he’ll respond by looping his own arm around my waist.

We were thus entwined at the entrance to a very crowded aisle, from which we needed only one item. Mr. Lucky volunteered to plunge into the mob and retrieve it while Baby Bear and I waited for him with the grocery cart.

Mr. Lucky was about to step away just as an old man shuffled by and mumbled something I couldn’t hear, but apparently Mr. Lucky did, for he only rolled his eyes at the old man, then grinned at me and Baby Bear before disappearing into the crowded aisle.

Baby Bear and I waited behind our cart, arms hooked around each other as he swayed from side to side, taking me with him. No doubt we looked like a pair of human windshield wipers. The old man continued glowering and muttering inaudibly before vanishing in the crowd of shoppers.

We’re used to disapproving scowls and inaudible grumbles from strangers.

Mr. Lucky soon returned, still shaking his head. “You didn’t hear what that old guy said, did you?”

No, I hadn’t. The commissary is a noisy place. Apparently we’d inadvertently blocked the old man’s path by stopping the cart while I put an arm around my son and he returned the gesture. Indignant, the old man had growled, “Why don’t you two find someplace else to fall in love?”

I must admit, that wasn’t as harsh as being barked at to “get a room.”

So the old guy thought my son, only a couple of inches taller than yours truly, was my boyfriend. He’s just turned thirteen and because of his height, he does look older. But as for me, “Do I really look that young?” I asked Mr. Lucky.

Talk about your missed opportunities. If only he’d said something like, “Well, of course, Karen! You look younger than everyone! Why, people mistake you for my daughter all the time!” I would have baked him a chocolate cake.

But no, instead he scoffed and said, “Oh, that guy is old and probably half-blind. All he saw were two people in his way. He was grumpy because he had to go around you.”

So much for a detour into the chocolate cake aisle.

Baby Bear's Adventures Through the Breaking Glass

An alternate subject line considered was, “What took him so long to break a window?”

I always feared it would be the sliding glass door to the patio (into which he does the occasional body slam), or his bedroom window (where I once caught him perched on the window sill as if he were about to use it as a diving board), or the glass doors on the curio cabinet (he likes to sit in front of it and peer past the knickknacks to his reflection in the back mirror).

But no, it was the living room window he broke and since there were no witnesses and he doesn’t/can’t talk, I have no idea how he did it. As always when these things happen, Mr. Lucky was at work, but when he came home later that night and surveyed the damage, he surmised that Baby Bear must have banged his head against the glass hard enough to shatter it. The kid does enjoy headbanging and our walls have numerous dents to prove it.

Those dents are getting higher every year, and I could probably go through every room of the house and assign an approximate date to each dent based on how high it is from the floor. Who needs fancy growth charts?

But I digress.

It was shortly before 8 pm the other night and I’d just taken dinner out of the oven when I heard the ominous crash from the living room. I rushed in to find a jagged hole in the upper window pane, and a bewildered looking Bear just standing there. He never made a sound and he looked all right, so I led him to his room for safety’s sake while I cleaned up the broken glass from the floor.

Then I went back to his room where he sat quietly on the edge of his bed. He was covered with blood.

To my horror, the worst of it was streaming down the inside corner of his eye along his nose, striking fear in my heart that he’d gotten glass in his eye. But I soon ascertained that the blood was coming from a cut on his forehead. He also had a cut on his lower arm. The poor thing had smeared blood all over himself, so he only looked worse than he really was until he was properly cleaned up and bandaged.

All the while, he never let out a peep. He went back to playing his keyboard and making his usual crooning noises while rocking on the loveseat in the family room, as if nothing had happened.

I also found broken glass in the front yard; big shards that flew up to ten feet from the house. I retrieved his ball that he likes to carry around, but there’s no way it could’ve broken the window. It’s a baseball sized “sensory” ball that weighs no more than two ounces.

Perhaps Mr. Lucky is right. It must’ve been that boy’s big hard head that did it.

As for replacing the broken window, I had the usual worst case visions of window repair specialists who wouldn’t be able to come out until two weeks from next Tuesday and bills in the hundreds of dollars; but Mr. Lucky replaced the pane himself the very next day, and it only cost him $24.00.

I like being wrong.

Mom and Apple Pie (and Ice Cream and Chocolates)

One of Mrs. Smith’s frozen, ready-to-bake apple pies has been taking up valuable real estate in our freezer since the holidays. I meant to bake it for New Year’s, but Mr. Lucky and the Crown Prince went up to Georgia to spend that holiday with the in-laws---leaving me to deal with Baby Bear and two dogs scared out of their wits by the next door neighbor's fireworks. At the time, I didn’t think it was right to bake that pie and eat it all by myself, so it remained in the freezer alongside a carton of vanilla ice cream.

Eventually Mr. Lucky couldn’t resist digging into the ice cream, leaving only the pie. Occasionally he’d ask, “So when are we going to have that pie, Karen?” and I’d mumble something about pie being “a weekend thing.”

Trouble is, Mr. Lucky works most weekends, and his overall schedule is such that, believe it or not, there’s never been an ideal time to take it out of the freezer and throw it into the oven.

I finally found the time this last week . . . when he and the Crown Prince returned to Georgia for another visit with his kinfolk. I remained at home for four days with two barking dogs and a roaring, rampaging Bear.

On the first evening with his dad out of town, Baby Bear emerged from his room in a deceptively cheery mood, bounced up to me in the middle of the kitchen, and with his trademark yell he pushed all five feet, eleven inches of me flat to the floor! I was barefooted on ceramic tile, so I had no traction to keep me on my feet, and because I happened to be in a part of the kitchen where there was nothing nearby to break my fall, down to the floor I crashed like the Colossus of Rhodes.

That hurt. But at least I came out of it better than old Colossus did. I think he broke into pieces at the bottom of the Aegean. I only got banged up (nice big bruise on the outer thigh), and was in a bit of pain for the next few days.

Since there’s no liquor in the house, I did the only other thing I could to maintain my sanity. I baked that apple pie and ate it with French vanilla ice cream.

I enjoyed a slice for every day Mr. Lucky and our firstborn were gone. That’s a quarter of a pie every day, covered with at least three scoops of the ice cream. I ate it all.

And I did not allow myself to feel so much as a scintilla of guilt.

Oh, and I consumed a whole bag of chocolates, too.

No guilt. Still no sanity, either, and certainly no weight lost, but NO GUILT!

Guess Who Broke the Dining Room Table?

Summer. For other mortals, it means fireworks, water fights, and long, hot, sweat-soaked days that never seem to end.

For me, it means—oh wait, that IS what summer is like at my house. In fact, that’s what it’s like all year round. Let me start over.

Summer. For other mortals, it means cookouts, the beach (well, maybe not this year), long road trips, and warm evenings chatting on the patio beneath a purple sky.

At my house, it means this:


I have no idea how Baby Bear accomplished this feat of destruction. In the past I’ve caught him sitting on it, standing on it, and the day before this happened, I found him hovering next to it, all innocent nonchalance, while the overhead chandelier swayed like a pealing church bell over the center of the table.

Just when I find myself wondering what atrocity that kid is going to commit next, he shows me. I guess I really need to stop wondering. I'm just thankful he wasn't hurt.

Baby Bear is over six feet tall, doesn’t have an ounce of spare flesh to pinch, and has the strength of ten oxen.

Forget Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign. I need one called, “Let’s Just Sit.”

Adventures in Eating Out (Minus the Bear)

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, when I was in the Air Force stationed at Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt, Germany, I often took my meals in the cafeteria at the base hotel. Since I don’t like crowds and noise and chaos (yeah, yeah, I know), I tried to avoid going there during peak hours.

Sometimes I’d have the cafeteria all to myself, and I could sit wherever I wanted, eat my meal, and read The Stars and Stripes newspaper in peace.

Until a family came in. Mind you, it was always a different family, since the Rhein-Main hotel catered mainly to transient military personnel and their dependents. But the makeup of the family was pretty much the same each time: They always had ten kids (or at least it seemed like ten) all under the age of four, one of whom was invariably a baby who never stopped crying.

No matter where I sat in that cafeteria, they always took the booth right next to mine. Every single time. There were a hundred other places they could’ve sat, including some with more space for their brood that I swear actually multiplied by the time I got to my dessert and the back page of the paper. But no—they always picked the booth right next to that lone skinny girl who they must have thought was bored senseless with her newspaper and her solitude, and surely would not object to having green jello flung into her hair.

The parents never took the seat that would’ve put their backs to me. Oh no, they always took the opposite seat, so their kids could lean over into my booth and stare at me as if I were behind bars munching on grass while someone hosed me down. On one occasion, one toddler actually climbed over the booth and landed in the seat across from me. The parents did not even budge. Instead—once it dawned on them they were missing a kid—they called out to him to come back from wherever he was. They had to do this several times before he complied.

Back in those days, I wasn’t assertive enough to speak up and say, “Excuse me, but would you please come and get your kid.” Hell, I wasn’t even assertive enough to pick up my tray and newspaper, and move to the other side of the cafeteria. I feared it would offend the parents. How stupid is that?

But I’m getting a little better about it.

Recently, after putting Baby Bear on the bus, Mr. Lucky and I went out to breakfast. Fortunately, the restaurant wasn’t too crowded, mostly couples or groups of adults. There was only one family in there with three kids, all preschoolers.

So guess where the hostess seated us?

That’s right. At point blank range for flying globs of oatmeal. She handed us menus, told us the name of our server who would be with us shortly, then walked away, leaving us to stare at each other in dismay.

Don’t get me wrong. Mr. Lucky and I have nothing against kids. We’ve had three of our own, all of whom we love very much. But when just the two of us go out to eat, we do not want to be near any kids, no matter how well behaved they are. It sort of defeats the whole purpose of why we’re eating out.

You’d think a restaurant hostess would know that. It should be in a rule book somewhere: Avoid seating couples without children near couples with children.

When the server finally arrived, I whispered to her, “We were wondering if we could sit somewhere else?” She whispered back that she didn’t blame us, and discreetly led us to a quieter booth on the other side of the restaurant. If the parents were offended—assuming they even noticed—I certainly did not care.

Our new booth was a vast improvement. Four well behaved adults occupied the booth behind Mr. Lucky. We ordered, and while we were waiting for our food, a strange, disagreeable look came over Mr. Lucky’s face. Then he sniffed his shirt sleeve.

“What’s the matter, dear?” I asked. “Isn’t your shirt April fresh? Do I need to switch detergents?”

He gestured to the empty booth across the aisle from where we sat, and whispered, “Let’s move over there.”

“Why? We’ve moved once already. We’re going to drive the server insane.”

Without another word he moved to the other booth. Since I didn’t want to sit by myself, I followed suit. And that’s when he informed me that someone in the booth behind him reeked of rampant B.O.

Fortunately we had no reason to move again. When the server arrived with our food, she made a good-natured comment on the fact that we’d moved, but she didn’t ask why and we volunteered no information. Better to let her think whatever she wanted to think, which is probably what most people think about us anyway.

Mr. Lucky left her an extra big tip.

In My House: The Creature From the Black Lagoon

The beagles have been digging more holes beneath the fence.

Meanwhile, the next door neighbor ran his sprinklers long enough that the water seeped over to our side of the fence, and flooded the beagles’ escape tunnel, making for deep puddles that have since turned into mud pits.

Add to the equation a back door left unlocked (Mr. Lucky pleads guilty), and one Bear with a knack for finding crisis in every opportunity, and what do you get?

Crime Scene Photo A: Paw prints from beagles observed in mud pit.

Crime Scene Photo B: Paw prints from Baby Bear visible on fence.

This is right outside my office window, and if the blinds hadn’t been closed against the glare of the sun against the neighbor’s formerly pristine white fence, then I most certainly would’ve seen Baby Bear.

As it is, I did hear a strange noise outside the window, reminiscent of those cheap sprinklers that go choop-choop-choop while they slowly jerk around in a semi-circle, spewing long jets of water over the grass, then go chuchuchuchuchu as they whip back like the return carriage on a typewriter.

I assumed the neighbor must be using that model sprinkler because the built-in system that came with his house was malfunctioning. Granted, the choop-chooping was more erratic than usual for such a sprinkler, but I thought little of it until I suddenly sensed a presence behind me, and turned in my chair.

Standing there just waiting to be noticed was a creature over six feet tall, made entirely of mud from head to toe.

I screamed for Mr. Lucky. The Mud Monster did not even flinch or attempt to pick me up and carry me back to his swamp like he might have back in the fifties.

Mr. Lucky found this very humorous. Fortunately Baby Bear’s bathroom is equipped with a handheld shower. Mr. Lucky applied it to the Mud Monster, and eventually the mud washed away to reveal our youngest son.

I’m just thankful the back gate was locked.