(Moment I came upstairs, Sam demanded to watch the video, giggling, “Do I really sound like that?” And the little rocking chair was safe from catastrophe, too.)

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It’s no secret that we’re, shall we say, less than fond of this house. It should also be no secret to anybody who’s watched more than a couple of news shows, glanced at a newspaper, or, heck, driven through their neighborhood and noticed at signs in people’s yards that selling a home right now is something of a risky proposition. Houses are sitting on the market…and sitting…and despite all our wishes to dump this house faster than we could blink, it’s probably not a good bet as something we could count on happening. I have friends in the area trying it. I also have friends who have given up and rented out their houses instead, which isn’t something we want to do.

So, what’s a family to do in a situation like this? They make the best of it, take a look around at the things that really, truly bother them about the house, and do what they can to make it better. In our case, that’s started with trying to purge and get rid of piles and piles of crap. I actually started to do this a while ago, when there had been a possibility of moving out of this place, but when it fell through, I lost my momentum entirely; now I’ve returned to the task with a vengeance.

On Thursday, the day before garbage pick-up, I started hauling things out to the curb, where I staged an “Alysia-style” yard sale; I tagged nothing, put up no signs, and managed to make $40 on stuff I just wanted to see gone. Most of what didn’t sell went to trash pickers overnight before the garbage truck came by the next day. Then yesterday and today, I hauled out loads of stuff out of the basement and took them to Goodwill; today, in fact, Eric helped by getting rid of piles of old hardware that has been sitting downstairs for years. Boom. Gone. It’s liberating.

Won’t lie; I’d rather focus on just dumping the place. But we’d have to do this part, anyway, wouldn’t we? No point in waiting until then.

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Turns out, “lightweight” is really subjective. It’s been a while since I tried to actually run with him in it, and it was an effort. On the other hand, it gave me an opportunity to talk to him about the freshly placed flags, and we took a moment mid-run to read the decorated headstones and think about what it all meant. He was very quiet for a while after that.

The rest of the day has been very low-key, with a brief veterans’ parade in the morning, followed by lunch and a return to home so Sam could finish up his homework. It was warm today, warmer than it has been so far this year, I think. I took advantage of it to go out and finish some yard work, the latter half of which Eric came out and joined me to complete. Thing is, I hate yard work; we both do. Honestly, it’s probably one of the biggest motivating factors which makes us think that our next move might be to a condo. I get no pleasure from trying to tame green things. It’s not that I don’t like them; it’s that I like them best when I can leave them to their own, or someone else’s, resources. I don’t get the idea of trying to grow grass. It’s…grass. Look at a field; it seems to be growing quite well without help. Why does surrounding it with a fence, or putting a house in the middle of it, suddenly cripple its sense of independence? Sissy little plant; I didn’t sign on to be your mother…

I swear, though, the Attack Weed-Trees were in full force. Eric battled them. At one point, I heard a loud crack! and his shout, and I turned around to see Eric lying on his back, triumphantly gripping the tree he’d managed to yank from the ground, at cost to his own balance. Victory! We ended up with four big bags of yard waste of which I now have to figure out how to dispose.

Got to go call my dad now. He’s a veteran, so it’s his day!

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Went downstairs; heard silence. Opened lid…and saw washer full of soapy water. It had stopped near the beginning of the cycle.

Being mechanically minded, stared thoughtfully at it, closed lid, reopened it, closed it again, and finally gave it a slight whack with the palm of my hand. It started back up again.

This…this can’t be good.

(Crap, I can hear that it’s now stopped again. Any suggestions?)

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How much have we gotten? I have no earthly clue, because it keeps blowing and blowing and BLOWING. Last night, our power was continually sagging (accompanied by some very eerie flashes in the sky behind our house; we debated over whether it was lightning or something more terrestrial), and the wind was howling at epic volume, knocking things right and left on our porch. The kids were equal parts impressed and alarmed. School had already been canceled for today, and they’d even been released an hour early yesterday because of the impending storm, so that was a bit anticlimactic; there was no chance for questioning, “do you think they will…?”, even with the utter giddy certainty that the answer was “definitely.”

Then we woke this morning to find that Eric’s work was also closed for the day, which was an unexpected blessing. It’s ugly out there. (But what does it say that my father felt strongly compelled, over the phone, to instruct me not to try to go out running in it?)

Anyway. We have bottled water, toilet paper, and cookie dough. We’ll live. Even if it means I have to take an unexpected rest day from running. (New meaning to “cabin fever.” ALL WORK AND NO PLAY…)

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But then, a few minutes after Sam had come out to join us in shoveling the driveway, he blithely informed me that he’d locked the door to the house behind us. My phone and house keys were on the other side, unfortunately.

A neighbor helped us break in the back door, which wasn’t too difficult, in retrospect, but also in retrospect, it would have been better to call a locksmith and pay whatever they wanted. The doorframe was old, and fixing that wood will be complicated. Worse, our kicks broke the plaster on the wall around the doorframe. My stomach sank when I saw it, and I wanted to throw up.

But we went to the party anyway (why not, at that point?), and when I vented my frustration to one of Eric’s friends, the story carried to another friend, whose husband does home remodeling and repair, so they’re dropping by in an hour to take a look at the door. It, of course, needs repaired immediately; the exterior door still locks, but it doesn’t hold heat well at all…and it’s cold out there. Snow, you know.

Why does this crap always happen when Eric’s away on business?

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Go ahead. Ask!

All day, since about 8:00 AM, there has been chaos in my kitchen.

Holes everywhere. Dust everywhere. An electrician, uttering such spine-tingling phrases as “Oh, my God,” “Whoa!” and “Man, there’s another one!” By the time he was “finished” (ooh, foreshadowing with punctuation), every last nerve in my body felt positively wrung out. And at the end, just before that, Sam and Gabe got home from school and the madness reached a peak with Gabe SCREECHING WILDLY at the injustice of being caught in a lie (he tried to accuse Sam of bugging him instead of the other way around) and Sam wailing about having forgotten his science book at school, and…DONE. I’m just DONE.

You know, until five minutes after the guy left, when Sam announced that we had no working light upstairs.

So now, with the guy back in our house, trying to puzzle it out (he seems truly mystified now), I think my mind has been truly broken, and I have no faith in its restoration this side of today.

Uploading fast now, before the computer decides to simply explode in front of me.

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Well, I didn’t tell you so, I don’t think, but I predicted it, both to the man on the phone and then over on Facebook. Our kitchen light, part of a ceiling fan, was flickering madly and making a…sizzling…sound when we turned it on. The guy on the phone, with the electrical repair company, said it probably needed to be replaced, and that we should buy a new fan and they would install it for us. I was all, “Sure, but, you know, when you guys were here before, the man said something about strange wiring behind the switch plate.”

And a guy came today, took down the fan, took the plate off the wall, and, to cut to the chase, I have NO FAN OR LIGHT anymore. He couldn’t in good conscience put the new one up, because (chant the refrain with me, folks) he had “no idea what they’ve done, here.” Figuring out the wiring to the fan will require opening up the wall, the ceiling, and possibly the wall on the other side of the room, since apparently the outlet there is also involved in the massive catastrophe that was the former homeowners’ idea of a fun pastime (which was obviously the gruesome torture of an innocent house). Seriously, if there’s a way they didn’t screw up this place, it’s only because they ran out of time before they popped out another kid, ran out of space, and had to move on to a bigger victim home.

I am in a pretty big funk. Doesn’t help that Eric’s in Mexico again, so we can’t hug each other for comfort.

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You let negative feelings about putting off tasks prevent actual work.

For example, if I feel guilt for not updating, it makes me not look forward to updating, and I’m trapped. Or else it’s just that there’s so, so much to talk about…

Mom and Dad have been and gone, and it was fantastic. We did the state fair, we played at playgrounds, Dad went on some of my runs with me (following me on a bike), we ate good food, we played games – just a low-key visit, and it was awesome, every moment of it. (Well, except for the evening when I discovered the soggy spot on the kitchen ceiling, which turned out to be a leaky toilet seal, which turned out to be due to soft floors in the bathroom…but at least I had my folks around to keep me from running screaming over the brink when the plumber delivered the bad news!) I only wish it could have been cooler up here; we’ve had the peak of the season’s warm temperatures recently, and Dad was all, “I thought you told me it didn’t get hot up here.” Sorry, Dad. But, hey, back home for you guys, it would have been over a hundred degrees, and we didn’t reach that point here!

So, yeah, our bathroom is going to need a little work in the near future. But do you know what? I was sort of on a roll with the whole “purge the house” thing, and Eric and I are now thinking we’ll keep it going, fix the things that need fixing, and blow this joint. Sell it, and sell it now. We’ve been dying to do that, but we felt overwhelmed every time we thought of the work it would entail. An emptier house is more quickly sold, so…work ahead. It’ll be easier to do that when the kids start school in a couple of weeks, too. (We won’t talk of those remaining weeks, though, one of which will find Eric out of the country. Bah.) I’m thinking I’ll start with the remaining upstairs rooms, and I’ll try to do a little basement work each day (that’s harder, since there’s so much down there that’s either not mine, or else it’s things that we don’t use often but don’t necessarily want to give up yet).

Anyway! On with the show!

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Voila: usable space.

You can see the closet in the bottom two shots. It’s still packed full of toys, but they’re at least organized by type (trains with trains, Playmobil with Playmobil, etc.) in boxes and bins. Very usable, if it can stay that way; I heard Gabe on the phone with each of my parents a little bit ago, informing them both that when they were done playing with something over their visit, it needed to be put back where it was.

Oh, and that big bin under the table in the top picture is all Legos. Yowzers.

The purge continues…I’ve got some momentum, and the basement beckons!

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Oh, yes; I know how to schedule my time and energy.

Right now, the kids’ workroom is getting closer to where it’s going to be; there are still things in there that need to come out, and a few surfaces that need emptied, and we need to get the computer hooked up in there, but it’s at least mostly usable space. The living room, on the other hand, was collateral damage. Sam’s desk that was in here needed to be taken upstairs, and so it needed to be cleaned out first, and…let’s just get the mental image of the whole “Snakes in a Can” gag, or perhaps a clown car spouting out passenger after unlikely passenger, because good GRAVY, I don’t see how all this madness was contained in that little wooden desk. It’s not all fitting back in there, certainly – not that it needs to, after having filled almost two large garbage bags as I emptied it. And there are still large piles, even now that the trash has been removed and the pens, pencils, crayons, glue bottles (we had six!), and other items have been organized into the craft cart. Yikes.

(But let me take a moment to just stand in amazement that I am the mother of a kid who can actually help lift and carry a heavy wooden desk up two flights of stairs. Of course, the same son collaborated with another boy just older than him yesterday in maneuvering a few other mid-sized pieces of play furniture into the back of a car without so much as being asked to, so maybe it’s not so shocking, but it continues to be so to me.)

So, I press on. And Gabe is a little confused but game about the how and why of all this commotion; he knows that it’s related to his starting school, and he knows that he’ll be doing more Work in the near future, but he’s still trying to fill the emptied desk drawers with toys and to decide whether he’s willing to let Sam continue to work at the desk, now that it’s been declared community property.

Back to work!

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I’ve been clearing out the playroom. As Eric described it, the playroom was “where toys go to not be played with,” anyway; the boys would grab toys from it and bring them downstairs to play, but mostly they’d play with what was already downstairs. Anytime I attempted to make the room more attractive to them, they’d quickly cover every available inch of floorspace with toys…and then abandon the room again.

So now I’m removing and giving away or donating the toys they’ve outgrown, organizing and crating up the toys we’re keeping but which don’t get much playtime anymore, and generally creating a more usable space for work. So far, it’s been a great deal of work with little obvious payoff, but I’m getting there. Today, I intend to clear out the bookshelf in there of all the board books and books we don’t need or want, paring it down to a level that can be held with a bookshelf that, say, isn’t a stiff breeze away from total collapse (why, we have one such shelf in the basement, in fact!). I also want to make a final effort to go through the toy boxes in the living room, checking for game and toy pieces that are missing from sets and games. If they’re not found there, those sets and games are out of here! (It’s hard being the ruthless one in the family, but it’s necessary. The coming stuffed animal purge is going to be the worst; I might even have to do that when even oft-sentimental Eric isn’t around…)

Good thing it’s cooler today; the past few days have been a sweaty piece of work.

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Some people I know are really, really “good” at shopping. They can – and do! – use coupons. They can calculate unit prices in their heads, and they can recall from memory what a reasonable unit price for any particular item might be. They can keep a running tally in their heads as they shop, estimating how much they’re spending as they go.

I am not one of those people. I blush to admit it, but until now, I’ve tended to impulse shop the whole way through the store. Looks yummy? I’ll get it. Shopping online, through Peapod, helped some, but I’ve sort of stopped doing that as I’ve gotten more into label reading and healthy eating; many of the more obscure items (chia seeds and nut butters, I’m looking at you) just aren’t on Peapod, so I’ve drifted away.

Now, Eric supports us well, but it’s pretty frustrating to see a paycheck just vanish every couple of weeks the way it seems to. We started taking a look at it, and…it’s food. It’s eating out, and it’s groceries. Gah.

From two different directions over the past couple of days, I got added motivation to change. First, my cell phone died on my run Saturday. We replaced it Monday evening, which I’d been dreading having to do, since the stuff I was able to do for “free” on my old phone was going to require a data plan on a new phone. (Reader’s Digest Condensed Version: all I wanted was my calendar on my phone, and any phone able to sync up, even over USB, with my computer’s calendar was going to have to be a “smart phone,” and a new law as of this year requires all smart phones to have a data plan, whether you’re planning to use it or not. ) So Eric chose for me this new phone (thank you very much, corporate discount!). The added monthly bill for the plan isn’t nice, but what is nice is the way this phone seems fairly eager to assist me in budgeting and spending control. (Hey, there, free Mint.com app!)

This is getting long. Anyway, Eric and I looked at finances, and he decided we’d start with trying to keep grocery bills under $80 a week. Now, that sounds reasonable, but I’m sort of embarrassed to say how tense I got just thinking about it, feeling like there was just no way I could do it. I am appallingly bad with numbers, and I’ve never been good at budgeting. Add to that the fact that I’ve fallen off with meal planning (picky eaters can take the wind out of your sails quite a bit), and…my nails, they were well-bitten.

Then I went to the store this afternoon (sans kids, thank God), phone in hand, with a grocery list and an app that kept a running tally of expenses for me. Eric called partway through and joked that he was picturing me whimpering “Clean all the things?”, which wasn’t all that off-base.

But.

$79.27, y’all. And that was even without calling Eric and demanding to know whether he and the boys really needed to be eating extremely overpriced hunks of animal meat, anyway.

(Now, don’t make me go back. And if the boys gripe about no snack crackers, I’m going to throw things.)

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I was pretty beat up following the half-marathon on Saturday, and I rounded it off with a stupid decision not to take along water for my 10-mile recovery run the next day, on a relatively warm afternoon. Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling at the top of my game for a couple of days after that. Maybe that’ll fill my quota for self-inflicted damage for a while? Crossing fingers and eyeing the toes that by all rights should have surrendered and fallen clean off my feet, for all the times I’ve rammed them them into solid objects…

Got an appointment in a few hours with some fence repair folks. Ours is sagging and pulling away from the posts in the back, a few of which (according to the folks who came yesterday to give an estimate) are broken themselves. This will be the second estimate; I sure do hope it’s a lower number than the one we got yesterday, which made Eric mutter some very choice words. If we keep getting high numbers, I get the feeling it’ll be just us and a drill out there, showing off our very best kludgemanship.

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This afternoon…
SAM: “Gabe stepped on a big ant, and then two other ants came and carried it away! He smashed my dreams!”

I think we’re gearing up for a simply smashing set of teenage years, don’t you? At this rate, I ought to start transcribing our daily dialogue and selling it to daytime television writers.

I’ve been really hopping the past few days. We rearranged the furniture in the playroom and the kids’ bedroom, in the process weeding out a ton of old clothes, baby gear (why did we still have an infant bathtub in the closet, I ask?), and old toys. Much better now; I feel psychically lighter. Still much work to be done, though. The basement is full to bursting with stuff that can just Go Away. I’ve still got bags of clothes to be donated in my bedroom, mostly because much of it is in excellent condition and my mom wants a peek through the stuff that would fit her.

They’ll be here tomorrow afternoon! My fridge and freezer are also overflowing, but that, at least, was intentional.

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Unfortunately, I’m also beginning to feel overwhelmed by the work facing me for the coming couple of weeks. My parents are coming on Tuesday for a week, and the house is a wreck, and I’m in the middle of a couple of purging projects that have things looking even worse than usual, and I have to figure out what to cook and what we’ll need to have on hand (somehow, I doubt my dad would be thrilled to go mostly vegetarian for a week ). Both kids’ playground programs have little parades today, and Gabe is technically supposed to either push a baby buggy (we have none, and I don’t think he’d go for that anyway) or be on a ride-on toy; he has a tricycle, but he’s refused to ride it up until now, so we need to get out and practice this morning to see whether he’ll change his mind and we should decorate the thing. Otherwise…I dunno, maybe I’ll just wrap the provided streamers around him: my kid, the Human Float. Sam’s parade is later this evening, but the paper isn’t even clear about whether the stated location is the parade’s destination or the starting point. Hurray for ambiguity! And nobody has said whether he’s supposed to ride a bike or anything, either, so we won’t know about that until about an hour before the parade’s start.

I’m also cracking up about how it’s very overcast out there right now and looks like it could rain at any second, despite the forecasts of “partly cloudy.” Memories of last year’s parade ran through both my own and Sam’s minds this morning…

Anyway, Mom: if things look a bit chaotic when you show up, I trust you’ll forgive me?

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Planted: one Bing Cherry tree, one Bartlett Pear tree. Also, roughly 50 pounds of soil into the flesh of my hands.

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Of course, then we went out for lunch at a pizza buffet, and it was all downhill from there. The kids were well-behaved there, but then we pushed our luck and tried for sushi at dinner, and Gabe just didn’t have it in him. Oh, well.

No dishwasher, though! We were having so much fun that we just never got around to that. Maybe this weekend! And now that temperatures are really starting to perk up in these parts (excepting the sleet and snow we had a few mornings ago), I’d really like to think about finally doing some yard work – most notably, replacing the tree in the backyard that we had taken down a few years ago. I don’t want a huge tree, such as we had, but a smaller one, perhaps with pretty blossoms, would be lovely. I need to move the rhododendrons out of the front yard, too, and into the back somewhere. They’ve never thrived where they are, since there’s just not much sun there. I’ll replace them with something evergreen-ish and hardy, and I hope they survive transplanting; I’m not a gardener, by any means.

Well, this was a thrilling entry… They can’t all be wolves and whatnot.

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Funny part was when Sam saw the video, heard me talking to him, and fell for it. “I was there? You said my name! When did we have a wolf?” Small, gullible kids mollify me when my jokes aren’t bought by other people. Yesterday morning, I woke up Sam by saying, “Why did you go back to bed?! Get up! It’s dinner time, and we’ll be late for Bible Blast!” For a good ten minutes, he was believing he’d managed to completely forget an entire day of school somehow – until I had him check the calendar, then stared meaningfully at him for a bit. Then he was mad, so I pranked Gabe for a while (“There’s a mouse on your head! Ooh, he just ran down your shoulder – he’s in your ear!”) to cheer Sam up and get him into the spirit of the holiday. Worked like a charm. I hope my kids carry the spirit of playfulness with them forever.

In the time that I was offline, we had plumbers out to the house again. Started running the dishwasher, only to hear Eric call from the basement that water was streaming from the ceiling. Plumber said it was the dishwasher, not the pipes; repairman said that there was a leak around the motor, but that the dishwasher was so old (possibly about 15 years) that repairing it wasn’t worth the cost of a new one. So we’re appliance shopping. Feel my enthusiasm? Yup. But I loathe doing dishes by hand, so it must be done. I’m a very grumpy girl at the moment, and one with dishpan hands already.

Oh, but we made Dirt Cake for preschool. That was a fun diversion.

And I registered for the Marine Corps Marathon yesterday! I’ll be bouncing around over that for a while. Have to get into planning now, though; I think we’re driving down, but when? And where to stay? (Around my folks for a bit, but we’ll need to stay in DC at least the night before.) And, most importantly, who will I be able to meet up with while I’m there, at least for lunch or something?

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I hope this is cheap, or at least not too bad. Tried plunging it, fishing down it – couldn’t even feel the obstruction. Drano is a laugh, since whatever’s clogging it won’t even let any liquid at all down. Now I have a murky green soup in the basin instead of a plain gray soup. Yay?

I also hope it doesn’t take too long, since we have “Safari Night” at Sam’s school tonight. I’m already feeling disrupted, since I had planned on a leisurely coffee morning alone today, but I remembered at the last minute that Gabe had a field trip to the fire station, for which I had to accompany him. He was less than well-behaved for that, to put it mildly (partially my fault; with other stuff brewing this morning, I didn’t make sure enough that he had a balanced breakfast, and he didn’t wind up getting any protein at all), so things are all heading swiftly downhill. I hope we hit level ground soon!

Whoops, that was FAST! I seriously just got off the phone with the plumber less than five minutes ago, and he’s here already!

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Right now, our solution, after futilely attempting to staunch the flow, is to build a makeshift trough toward the floor drain. This was actually Eric’s dad’s idea, after we came up blank. (I actually thought of trying to use the rubber tubing from the old aquarium, but it was too narrow and we don’t have any kind of putty.) Eric was freaking out with steadily increasing volume, and he’s now gone out to a work-related holiday party, for which I couldn’t get a sitter so we both could attend. Presumably, he’ll be trying to console himself with yummy goodies and good company; all I’ve got is you guys and a host of liquors – well, I’d have that host if I didn’t have to remember to go downstairs and check the influx periodically. And, of course, if I wasn’t the sole Parent On Deck. I told Eric not to stay too late, if it could be helped.

He’s in the “MUST SELL HOUSE NOW WHILE STILL MOSTLY SANE” state that we hit every so often. I tried to calm him, suggesting that we revisit that in the spring, but now he’s all about getting an inspector out to identify what must be fixed before selling. I’d say that waterproofing probably will fall high on the list. Then again, I’d have guessed that holes in the wall were prone to be a Not Good idea, so perhaps it should be left to the professionals and out of the hands of silly little girls like me.

Give me snow, honestly.

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So we didn’t get up early this year, especially since we’d decided to limit the items purchased to only a few things for each of us. Frankly, there’s just not enough room around here for piles of crap, and the boys are happy enough with what they have. There are only a couple of things that have been mentioned around here consistently enough to make it apparent that they weren’t just passing fancies that would fade as quickly as they arose. One of them was, well…

  

The old computer was now very, very outdated. My iPod died a week ago, losing a complete battery charge in about an hour, and all the new iPods were incompatible with our older OS. My Garmin has never been able to “talk” to our computer. Lots of other little things, and Eric was getting antsy; “Want to replace the Mac?” has been a frequently bandied-about question for the past six months or so. And then the Black Friday sales went up, and Eric decided we’d go for it.

Already, the coolest thing has been video-chatting with my parents, who also replaced their old computer with a Mac recently. That was simply awesome!

Anyway, Merry Christmas to us! I think we all feel pretty darn spoilt about now. And with the snow that fell last night (only a couple of inches, but more might be on the way Wednesday), it feels relieving to have this to play with instead of just growling out the window.

Might go out to the gym here in a bit. I already feel my resolve to keep running outside slipping away some. Running in the cold or in falling snow is one thing, but…post-holing an entire run? What do you do when there’s significant snow on the ground? These look a bit rich (and INSANE) for my blood. Seriously, I’m at a loss. If I stick to places that get plowed and shoveled quickly, I’ll be dealing with random ice patches on mostly dry ground, so my YakTrax will be next to useless for the slipping (can’t wear them on clean pavement). If I stick to the few unplowed areas I can list, I’ll be hopping through drifts and exhausting myself. Can I win?

Holidailies sign-ups are going on! Get you some!

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By a high bid of three whole dollars over the next-highest, we won a 2006 Chrysler Town & Country! Yahoo! We can actually separate the boys for trips! And it was a really good deal, too. Holy crap, I can’t wait to drive this thing; we’ll actually be able to carpool with people for the first time since having children! And it’ll have a radio, too – we haven’t replaced ours in our Saturn since it was stolen several years ago. Ah, the simple pleasures in life.

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I make myself wait for it all. Christmas stuff isn’t allowed to be displayed in my house until after Thanksgiving (and it must come down at Epiphany, and no later). Thanksgiving is reserved for after Halloween, of course. And Halloween is kept sacrosanct for the month of October.

Then all restraints are removed.

I was never hugely into Halloween until college, when my second freshman roommate (the first was a tragic tale and short-lived, better left untold) was a complete Halloween addict. The day we moved into our dorm room, I found her stringing little flashing pumpkins over her window – in September. They stayed there all year; I grew accustomed to them. When we moved apart after that year, I even sort of missed them.

In my own home, I find myself really enjoying decorating for holidays, and especially for Halloween. It’s just not acceptable, for some reason, to hang shiny purple and gold spiders from your ceiling fans at any other time, and as regrettable a statement as that may make about current societal tastes, it’s refreshing to pry loose the bonds of everyday decorating strictures for one month of the year. I do have to restrain myself a smidge at present, what with my children’s reluctance to allow anything over a PG-level of frightening in the house. (Skeletons are okay, as long as they don’t talk; creepy eyeballs may be acceptable, but blood is over the line.) That’s all right; plenty of years to come for me to go all Hellraiser with the dining room.

Gabe is asleep at present, and I’m hoping to have most of our current stash out of boxes and onto the walls by the time he wakes. He should enjoy the switch in mood, I hope! He’s a little confused about why I’m putting up pumpkins and not birthday cakes, though; he knows that his birthday is in October, so if it’s time for Halloween, why are there no party hats?

Uh-oh, I hear him calling. Time to start the magic!

Postscript:
GABE: “It’s like Christmas…with spiders!”

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I’m not an entomologist, but I know what I thought those were, swarming about the base of the boys’ playhouse. Eric was pale and muttering at the sight, mentally seeing horrible networks of termite damage to the foundation of our house. I snapped some pictures, and then we blanketed the ground with clouds of whatever insect poison we could grab. (Gabe, meanwhile, was howling in outrage that were were killing the bugs he’d befriended.) I mailed the picture to my dad, a former pest control inspector, and quickly called home to have him check his mail and please tell me that I wasn’t seeing what I thought I was.

Thank God, he was able to follow through with that. Not termites, he said. Citronella ants, which, it seems, manage to scare the bejeezus out of people all the time with the way they sort of look like termites. Additionally, once we were able to start looking at information about citronella ants, we learned that they feed on the waste of aphids – the same waste which has been falling from our neighbor’s tree and literally coating our car for the past month or so, leaving a sticky mess everywhere. That was reassuring in the extreme.

Before learning that last part, though, as we were driving around town, we kept noticing those same bugs, one or two at a time, hovering over our windshield or car hood. Not realizing that these were just stragglers trying to follow their meal down the road, we began to wonder whether the whole town was being blanketed in these guys. “A plague?” I proposed. It felt almost appropriate; rivers of blood and falling frogs would have been just the thing to end the day I’d had.

Today has been less dramatic, but more confusing and rushed. I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath until now. I did do my run today, and although three miles was just enough to irritatingly whet my appetite for more, my negative splits were quite satisfying, dropping almost ten seconds per each successive mile. I just wish the forecast wasn’t predicting big rains for tomorrow morning; running in the stuff isn’t a problem, but doing cross country and muddy trails in a downpour sounds less fun.

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Still. It is a pain in the neck to deal with weeds and weird wild plants around the edges of our yard when it appears that on all three sides, the neighbors are choosing to ignore the patches of their own yards that meet our fence.

And when a neighbor’s trees go so wild that the branches are overhanging my yard to the point of sagging almost to the ground, I’m justified in lopping them off, aren’t I? (I did refrain from lobbing the cut branches back over the fence, much as I considered it.) I left the branches, spanning the entire back corner of our yard and actually heading for a third neighbor’s yard, that are bearing mulberries, though, and I don’t believe I’ll stop Sam from partaking, either. Is that wrong?

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My brother made Sam a Photoshopped card with Sam’s face on Indiana Jones’ body, and he sent him the movie theme mp3. Sam is bouncing like a maniac, humming the music and grinning; Gabe is ticked because he can’t hear through the headphones on Sam’s head (and I refuse to put the theme on neverending repeat on the computer). I had mentioned to Eric that I should dig out my old Walkman for Gabe, but that’s not going to pacify him for long if he also wants the same music that Sam has. Life is hard when you’re three.

I was chatting with our neighbor yesterday, and I apologized for the tantrums that have to be loud enough for the whole street to hear. He laughed and said that his mother, who lives with him, was saying, “Is that Sam?” on one occasion, and he told her, “No, that’s the little guy!” Gabe is a terror with the screaming. I don’t know what he hopes to accomplish by keeping it up, considering that every time he hits fever pitch, I put him in his room, telling him that he’s not being safe anymore. But he howls, kicks, tells me that he’s going to “bounce you out the window” and that he’s “never going to speak with you, never again!” He turns bright red, sweats, waves his fists, and makes a very impressive amount of noise, and it’s really getting old, fast. (Getting?) At this point, I’d just about gladly trade it for the sassy sarcasm that age four brings. At least that doesn’t cause the entire population of a superstore to turn and search to see who’s disemboweling a child.

Just a to-do list after the link; feel free to skip.

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Read the rest of Rain, rain, quit making me worry… (30 words)

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