Mother-in-law: We have too many birthdays in November and December.
Father-in-law: Yeah, no one should have any more babies in November or December.
Chris’s brother-in-law: (already has one child and has stated he isn’t sure about having another) Don’t look at me. Jane?
Me: Well…okay. But I’m also not having a baby in January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, or October.
I’m hoping that the massive number of mosquitoes we’ve experienced in our new place has nothing to do with the location of said place, and everything to do with the rain we’ve had this year. Because if this is from the location, I’m either going to have to start looking for a new place right away or find a nice parka that goes down to my ankles and zips up to my chin.
Tonight the dogs and I were out for maybe five minutes while they stared at the parking lot of CVS and I tried to encourage them (unsuccessfully) to pee. Their curiosity satisfied (”there are still cars over there”), the dogs agreed to come back inside.
I felt a tiny tickle on my right leg, and scratched it. Before I’d taken more than three steps into the house, I began to suspect it was a mosquito bite. So I got some cortisone and put it on my leg, and that’s when I noticed a very still mosquito on my hand.
I wasn’t sure if it was already dead or not, so I whacked it with my other hand anyway, and its blood (or rather, my blood) squirted out of it. I hadn’t even itched it, but the bite has now become the size of a quarter.
The bug bite on my leg turned out to be three mosquito bites in a row, which have now become some kind of horribly swollen continent of itchiness.
Normally I don’t expect housewarming gifts, since this is our fourth house, but if you really, really, really want to give us something, I would be thrilled with any of the following:
- Giant economy-sized tube of cortisone
- Lyme disease treatment pills, from the doctors among you
- Beekeeper’s helmet
- Dogs who will run outside, pee, and run right back inside without lingering while you get eaten by the local insect population
If you haven’t already, first go read my tiny dog adventure about Fat Tony.
Then come back here.
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New adventure that took freaking forever to upload because the nav bar was pushed underneath, so I resized all the pictures multiple times and reuploaded, only to eventually find out the problem wasn’t with the pictures at all, but because I had left out a slash mark in an html tag.
Grrr.
Here it is.
One of the few benefits of living in a condo on a busy street is the small yard. Our new home was chosen carefully to have a yard just big enough for three chihuahuas, but not so big that it could support, say, a herd of wild turkeys, a family of deer, and a really retarded rabbit.
I figured that at least here, we were urban enough to be free of the ticks and wildlife-induced diarrhea that plagued us in Wayland, but before a week had passed in the new house, we had spotted suspicious pellets on our deck.
The pellets looked a lot like the deer/rabbit poop we’d seen in our Wayland yard, and then when I saw flies congregating on it, I knew for sure that it was one of my worst fears: Poop of Indeterminate Origin.
The Poop of Indeterminate Origin soon became the Poop of Determinate Origin when Chris spotted the lone animal in our yard that didn’t require us to regularly feed it: a squirrel.
For reasons known only to himself, Christopher has christened this squirrel, “Fat Tony.”
Fat Tony nimbly jumps from one fence post to another, occasionally pausing to chitter mockingly at the dogs below. This never fails to infuriate Mina, who races along our chicken wire fence, barking madly and leaping in the air. Stanley is usually right behind her, although there was one time when he actually caught up with Fat Tony. I hadn’t seen this momentous event for myself, so Chris told me about it later.
“And then what happened?” I gasped, envisioning a situation similar to the Great Rabbit Massacre of 2007.
Chris shrugged. “Stanley didn’t know what to do with him once he’d caught him.” And so Fat Tony easily escaped, to return another day to taunt the dogs.
Paco has never had to depend on himself to find food, so although he allows himself to be peer-pressured into joining the barking, he soon stops and wanders aimlessly away. Paco knows only that these animals in our yard are apparently supposed to be fun to chase and/or eat, according to the other dogs, but he has never quite seen the point of all that running unless there was someone waiting at the end of it all to cook, slice, and serve the animal to him.
On days that Fat Tony doesn’t deign to show up himself, he will often leave his calling card on our deck. Instead of a large clump of tiny pellets of poo like the deer and rabbits left for us, Fat Tony appears to have a slower constitution. In other words, one or two pellets will appear at one side of the deck, and another pellet will show up ten feet away and around the corner at the other end of the deck. Cunningly, Fat Tony will secrete his poo pellet in the crack between two deck boards so that we humans cannot spot it, but Miss Mina Beana can.
It took me and Chris two weeks to start filling our refrigerator, but only a few days for Mina to find her own local, organic, sustainably farmed food source. We have Whole Foods; she has squirrel poop.
The privilege of having your flight to California delayed six hours and your subsequent flight from California delayed four and a half hours: $379
The amount of the food voucher American Airlines gave you, upon demand, for the delay of the first flight: $10
The cash you stuff into an envelope as a wedding gift for your cousin: $200
The opportunity of hearing the reverend officiating at the wedding ceremony read from what sounded to be Ephesians 5, during which he exhorted the husband to love his wife, and the wife to submit, respect, and honor her husband, and concluded by saying, “you have made the two one” to which you mentally add, “although admittedly one of you is only worth 3/5ths of the other”: Priceless
The dogs recently went through several bouts of liquid diarrhea. First was Mina, who got rushed to the emergency vet when we spotted blood in her poop. About $500 later, we found out her bloodwork was fine, her urine normal, temperature normal, and everything evidently just peachy keen, other than some slight dehydration caused by all the diarrhea, and the liquid poo running from her bottom.
They gave her some IV fluids, and sent us home with some kind of canine equivalent of Imodium that needed to be given for about a week.
About a week and a half later, I came home from work to a smell so hideous that I wanted to vomit. Apparently Paco had now succumbed to the diarrhea. I called our regular vet, and the vet tech/receptionist who answered the phone tried to convince us that the problem was related to their food.
“It’s that premium kibble,” she said. “It doesn’t have preservatives in it.”
I was deeply suspicious of this answer, since we’d been feeding the same bag of food since Mina got sick, and yet the dogs were getting sick at different times. So I brought Paco to the vet, where we got the same medication for diarrhea that the ER had given Mina. They found nothing physically wrong with him, other than his weight, which was still too high after two years of getting half the food of the other dogs.
When I told Chris that Paco still needed to lose another pound and a half, Chris was optimistic.
“Maybe the diarrhea will speed up the weight loss,” he said hopefully.
Two weeks later, just as Paco was nearly over his diarrhea, Stanley began having diarrhea. By now we were getting used to this, and I immediately put him on boiled chicken and rice, and off we went to the vet. He was apparently in great shape, just like the other dogs.
“It could be something they ate,” the vet said. “Or worms or parasites. Have they eaten anything unusual, gotten into any trash?”
“No,” I said. “Although we do have a rabbit that comes into the yard a lot, and…”
“Yes, they could have picked something up from the rabbit,” the vet said.
“So then they could get re-infected?” I asked. Horrified, I was now envisioning our house drowning in a sea of diarrhea . “The cycle will start all over again?”
“Well, it could,” he admitted, with the casual attitude of one who didn’t have three diarrhea-stricken dogs in a house that was about to be sold.
“If they start coming down with the diarrhea again, we’ll just worm them all,” he said.
And sure enough, Mina began to have diarrhea again while Stanley was still taking medication for his diarrhea. We were supposed to be out of our house within a few days, so we dosed everyone with the pills from the vet and kept an eye out for the rabbit.
I wasn’t happy about the dogs and their diarrhea, but I still couldn’t help but have a grudging admiration for the rabbit. It had taken her a year or two, but she’d finally gotten her revenge for the babies she’d had to abandon when Stanley dug them up.
Chris and I are moving in about a week and a half. Because we had sold our house before we found a new one, we hadn’t really started packing because we hadn’t known where our stuff would go.
But now that we’ve found a house and the home inspection will take place on Monday, I am no longer able to continue living in denial and was forced by Chris to pack today.
Packing was too overwhelming for me, so instead I threw stuff away. Sometimes I think packing would be easier on me if everything simply burned down; that way I wouldn’t miss what I don’t remember. But having to look at every item and make a call on whether it should be kept or tossed is incredibly difficult — how can you blithely throw away the totally useless turtle marionette that you purchased at a street fair in Australia and then dragged home for the kids you would someday never have?
Hmm. Perhaps that wasn’t the best example. Because now it sounds really easy to toss away a marionette like that.
The only item I knew I was keeping, for sure, was my wall hanging of 12 tiny stuffed Disney figures velcroed on.
“I had to eat like 16 boxes of cereal to get that,” I told Chris when he brought it out to show me. “I don’t care what you say, but I am keeping it.”
So I kept the wall hanging, but I felt guilty about it, so I decided to throw away all my musical equipment instead. I hadn’t used any of it in the 4 years we’ve been in this house because I just got too busy with work and dogs and life, and this house just didn’t have the space I needed to set up the equipment easily. Also, I was no longer depressed, and it turns out that I can only write music when I’m depressed. (Sample lyric: “You talk of love, but the words fall out of your mouth like the tears from my eyes.”)
Rather than drag the equipment to yet another house where it would only serve to remind me of how much more productive I used to be, and also how much more unhappy, I put up a Craigslist ad offering it for free. Hopefully, there would be at least one person who wanted a bass guitar, acoustic guitar, multitrack recorder, and random miscellaneous cords whose provenance I could not determine.
I was going to include the synthesizer which my father bought for my younger sister decades ago before I reappropriated it for my music, but then I happened to go on to Ebay and found that it was selling for about $200, which, OH MY GOD, why? Well, whatever the reason, people seemed to want this, so I stuck it on Ebay at 99 cents.
Then I promptly forgot about my auction and Craigslist ad, because I had a wedding to get to. When I came back home five hours later, painfully full of really delicious wedding food, the synthesizer was up to $60 and I had over 25 emails asking for the free equipment.
“How do I choose who to give this stuff to?” I wailed to Chris, who was busy being “a ranger of Hyboria” on the computer.
“Just give it to the first person who responded,” he said.
“But the first person was stupid. He wanted to know where we were located, and I already had our town name in the ad,” I said.
“Okay, then the second person.”
“Well, she sounds too perky. I bet she just wants it to re-sell.”
“Then delete your ad and put up a new one and ask for money,” Chris said, fingers busily tapping at his keyboard, brain possibly wondering why he had wasted two minutes on this conversation, two precious minutes when he could have explored a new room or killed some kind of creature.
“That seems unfair,” I muttered. “I mean, I already said I would give it away for free.”
I thought about the problem. And that’s when I came up with my idea. I would make people APPLY for the free stuff! HAHAHAHA!!! Make them do some work for it!
“Write a quick note and tell me why you want the stuff,” I typed into my Craigslist ad. “I will arbitrarily decide who gets it. Yes, some people will lie.”
Power. Some people thrive on it and become better and stronger. I am not one of those people.
In my never ending and so far unsuccessful quest for the best and cheapest haircut, I have not made a repeat visit to any hairdresser/hair stylist/hair salon in the last five years.
This means that every time I get a haircut, I go through a conversation like this:
Hairdresser: So are you done with school? College?
Me: Yes.
[slight pause]
Me: I’m [32, 33, 34, whatever age I am that year].
Hairdresser expresses shock.
I explain I look exactly the same as I did in high school.
If I am feeling particularly chatty, I explain that I had about three years when my hair actually looked somewhat different, but have now gone back to my old high school cut.
Hairdresser diverges into soliloquy about the way Asians all look young for their age.
Hairdresser is still wielding scissors, so I decline to say what I’m really thinking, which is that maybe Asians look so young because they don’t have the time/inclination to sit all day in the sun/in a tanning salon and bake on some wrinkles.
Hairdresser: So when did you last get your hair cut?
Me: Three months? No, maybe five. Or six. I hate getting my hair cut, so I let it go as long as I can.
Hairdresser is horrified and picks up a lock of my hair and eyes it dubiously.
I mention casually that I have gone to a different salon every time I needed a haircut in the last five [four, three] years. I try to imply, with suggestive facial expressions, that she/he could be the one to make me break my destructive pattern and actually make a return visit.
Except I never do.
When I woke up with a headache last week, I was tired and grumpy and felt like I had a hangover. I’m almost always tired and grumpy, so I didn’t care about that part, but the headache and hangover were new and undoubtedly caused by spending the previous few days playing in a rock band.
Or rather, not just any rock band, but Rock Band.
Yes, I have finally jumped on the video game bandwagon.
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