I Wish My Dog Spoke English

I know she understands when I say, "Good dog, good dog," and I give her plenty of those, because she really is a sweet little thing. And I'm pretty sure she knows "Sit" and "Stay" if there's a milk bone involved.

But it would be much more helpful to me if she understood a few other colloquialisms:
 
"I'm going to bed after this, so if you don't pee now, you won't be able to go again until the morning." 

"It's a litterbox, not a snack bar."  

"Your enthusiasm is flattering, but I'm only going to the washing machine.   I'll be back in 90 seconds."  

"Your enthusiasm is flattering, but I've only been gone 90 seconds, just like I said."  

"Get away from that rubbish barrel, please."  

"Have you never heard of toilet paper?"  (The cats could stand to learn that one, too, come to think of it.)

... and the related ...  

"OMFG, Zoet, not on the mouth!"

Happy Birthday, 98

98's birthday was last month, and I gave him tickets to Blue Man Group.   We didn't go until tonight, a month later, because this was the first 5:00 pm show I could get five front row seats for, and I knew I couldn't be trusted to stay awake for the 8:00 pm show.   It was: me, 96, 98, and two of 98's friends, let's call them Curt and Rod. They weren't twins, but if I had twins I would totally have named them Curt 'n Rod.  I am happy to report that I survived the evening without running away screaming, leaving them to take the train home alone spent the evening with four teenage boys. I love all four of these boys, and would run in to a burning building to save any of them but man, oh man, are teenage boys insufferable.

They argued about Pokemons (the plural of which 96 has reminded me more than once is Pokemon, but I say Pokemons because, well, I know it bugs him) and they argued about how long ago 15 minutes was.  They disagreed about 'Droid or iPhone.  They debated the merits of public vs. private vs. parochial.   They each knew stuff that the others didn't know, and they each had to make sure that all the others knew they knew this stuff they didn't know.   Do you remember Charlie Brown's teacher?   By the end of the car ride, that's all I heard.   That, punctuated with the random, "No, you're wrong," and "Shut up," and "You don't know anything."    Good to know it's not just mine.

The other thing I noticed about teenage boys: They havetohavetohaveto have the last word.   Every. Single.  Time.   The last word.  Spoken.  Has to be theirs.   And not someone else's.

See how annoying that is?

All's well that ends well, though. 98 made it home with a piece of spit-paintball-artwork from one of the bits.  As we were leaving I handed him a sharpie to ask one of the Blue Men for an autograph on the way out. The Blue Man did him one better, and swiped a bit of blue ink/makeup/whatever it is off his face and planted a cool thumbprint in the corner.  And the next time we go, we're going to count how many marshmallows that one guy ultimately crammed into his mouth.  Double digits, for sure.

Multiple Choice

I could really use some advice.  Seriously.

So, remember the Great Flood of 2010?   Because the creek behind my house was bringing so much of the flooding to the neighborhood, the city spent a fair amount of time hanging around my house, watching stuff.    They sandbagged the creek, the sandbagged my driveway, and we all got to be good friends.  The foreman, Charlie, had a peek at the cellar before and during the worst of the flooding and arranged for a plumber friend of his to install a sump pump for me, and an electrician friend to install a new outlet, since a pump requires its own, separate, grounded power source.  So that gets all done in the wee hours the day before that second flood, and the whole system worked like a charm.   Sure, I got a couple of inches of water during the second storm, but the week-old water heater and furnace, replaced after the first round of flooding, were unscathed. And dry.  I was immensely grateful, and made them cookies.

Well, the plumber that did the work is a city employee (who did the work on his own time, so no tax dollars involved).   But the only number I have to reach him is the city water department.   Thinking it was his cell phone, I called him on Saturday for a rather urgent plumbing ... ah, let's just call it a "situation".    More about that later.   So the city guy (who remembered the cookies) passed along a message, and the plumber called me Saturday and told me he'd be here on Sunday afternoon.   Well, here it is now Monday morning, and still no plumber.

And in case you're curious, here's the sequence of events:  I came home on Friday night to a wet downstairs bathroom floor and both boys denying any knowledge of a toilet backing up. This was just the first "hmm" of many this weekend, it would turn out.   The toilet flushes fine, but for lack of a better word, it's a little gurglier than usual. Then, on Saturday morning I went into the cellar to do laundry, only to find an inch-deep puddle, about 10 feet in diameter, directly under said bathroom.  With an appropriately audible "harumph" I cleaned this up, did my laundry, and went on with my day.

Ah, but now the plot thickens. The washer drains into a soapstone sink, which thankfully has a greater capacity than the front-loading washer, because when I returned to the cellar to change the laundry, both basins of the sink are filled with water.  Not overflowing, but filled 4/5 of capacity.

And the toilet that was gurgly but working fine? Not so much. Someone flushed and walked away, leaving lucky me to discover another wet floor and another inch-deep puddle in the cellar.  Thank you, FEMA, for that awesome shopvac.

No, I'm not done yet.  There's more.
 
So this morning I'm sitting quietly on the couch with Zoet, and we're watching Good Morning America (yeah, she thinks George Stephanopoulos is hot) and we hear a very distant ... can't quite place it ... barely audible woofing sound from ... is it outside?  Even Zoet noticed it, and I was curious.  It didn't sound like Daisy, our shepherd next-door-neighbor, and it didn't sound close enough to be a dog walking into the Fells right outside our window.  So I pulled a Timmy, and sent Lassie Zoet to find the source of the noise.

One of the boys was in the shower, which is directly over the downstairs bathroom, the aforementioned gurgly-toilet-bathroom. And the running shower was somehow causing air to bubble up through the toilet bowl: hence, the gurgling.  What's worse, as the gurgles continued, I saw the water level in the bowl rising.

So here we are, in a house with an upstairs shower that empties into a blocked downstairs toilet and a downstairs toilet that empties directly onto the cellar floor. (So no shampoo-rinse-repeat today, boys. Today you can take an if-you-really-took-a-shower-why-is-the-soap-still-dry shower.)

I am reluctant to call the city department again to try to get ahold of the plumber I was expecting to see yesterday, and in the meantime, I have found the name and number of a actual plumber who did actual work for us a couple of years ago.   So do I ...

A.)  Wait for the first guy?  And if so, how long do I sit in silence?
2.)  Call the city again and have them pass along another message?
C.)  Call 2-years-ago-guy and hope he remembers us and can come out?

Please advise. Quickly.

Valentine's Day, 1996

It seems to me I'm always mentioning how I find treasures rifling through drawers and files while I'm looking for something else. Today's tale is no different, except I don't recall that I was particularly looking for anything.  I just recently stumbled across the little card I used to tell Tom I was pregnant with Agent 96 on Valentine's Day, 1996. And even with the evidence in my hand, including the positive pregnancy test, which today still shows the [+] (and no, I'm not going to show you a picture of it!), I honestly have no recollection of doing this. I recall the card; in fact, when I was putting together photos for his memorial I wanted to include the card, a small, die-cut tiger.  A little secret between us was that I called him "Tiger", and he called me "Kitten". Eww, I know. What worse, when 96 was born, we called him "Tigger" sometimes. (Remember that rattle Zoet chewed up? It was 96's Tigger.)

Quick, get the insulin.

I remember giving him the card for Valentine's Day in 1996, I just don't recall the whole "I'm having a baby" spin.  How does a person forget something like that?

Usually, events with the second child take a back seat to the first: 96's baby book is complete, including the first day he sat, unaided, in a grocery cart (5 months) and his first fat lip (during the April Fool's Day blizzard in 1997); I sold 98's baby book in a yard sale, factory seal unbroken. The photos in 96's first year album are labeled; I don't even have a first-year album for 98. Of course, I famously have both boys' umbilical stumps in a carton in the attic. They are in the jeweler's boxes my engagement ring and wedding band came in.  Suffice it to say, saving those little belly buttons had me off raisins for a while.

Back to Agent 98. It's hard to imagine a memory burned more strongly into my synapses:. There I was, 40 years old, in the upstairs bathroom: 6-month-old 96 (who was still nursing full time, for the record) in one arm, and there, in my other hand, another [+].

"Tom ... can you come up here for a sec?"

No Snow Days Allowed

One of the early lessons we learned on Kwaj was that a person could, indeed, survive a full year, a complete trip around the sun, without so much as a single snowflake. Four years, in fact. I have made it my life's plan to experience another such existence, but alas, this plan shall have to wait a few years, probably until the boys are in college. But I predict a warm climate for this blogger's retirement years.

Why would I have days like this ...

... or this ...

... or this ...

or this ...

... when this ...

... qualifies as a snow day in San Antonio, Texas?  I kid you not: a snow day. A classes-cancelled, government-offices-opening-late, honest-to-God snow day. Can you see my nephew Isaac inside that heavy winter coat? No? That's because he's in a sweatshirt! For the record, he doesn't even own a winter coat. I own three: dressy, everyday, and a one just for snowblowing. Blowing snow blows.Unlike the Inuit, I don't need fifteen words to describe it. I only need four: It belongs somewhere else.

I have no use for snow. I don't ski, or skate or play ice hockey or make snow angels. I don't make ice cream out of snow.  My nose gets red and stays red the rest of the day. I look like I've been crying, or I've had too much to drink when I come in from the cold.  I really like hot cocoa, but I can make that a summer drink: I'll just turn my air conditioning on full blast. Yeah, that'll work.

Give me a good tropical  downpour any day of the week. It took some getting used to -- that bath water that fell from the sky on Kwaj. I can recall a dreary November day, the first day of the rainy season there in 1998. Maybe I had the a/c set a little too low, because I was kind of chilly. I looked outside before we left the house on our errands (as always on foot with the double stroller; I used the bike with the trailer as little as possible) and bemoaned to the boys, babies at the time, the grey and bone-chilling kind of November day I was so used to and was surely unconsciously expecting. I even took off my usual flipflops, trading them in for  socks and sneakers. Then I opened the door, and the warmest, humidest solid block of air I had ever felt knocked me backwards. Especially during the rainy season, you had to have at least a couple of sets of clothes planned for the day, because you knew you'd get rained on at least once. You had to plan photography ahead, because you had to give your camera 20 minutes to adjust from the dry 70's inside the house to the humid 88 it invariably was outside. The lens would instantly fog over, like eternally living in your bathroom after a hot shower. 

But by golly, it didn't snow once. And we lived to tell the story!

Interstate Adventures

I found myself in Cranston, RI this morning, where Agent 98 had a bowling tournament at Lang's Lanes. (Don't miss the chili cheese fries!) It was our second time bowling in Cranston in as many weeks. He didn't have the best day, but with a high score of 103, he beat his average, and that's really the point anyway.

So I get on the highway to come home after we're done, and notice a couple of interesting buildings that I hadn't noticed on the ride down ... and then another one ... and then I think to myself, "Where'd Providence go?"   I had driven eight miles on 95 South before I realized my mistake.

If that was only the first time I'd ever gotten lost on 95 that would be one thing. Or if it had been the most lost, I could accept that. But I have an even stupider lost than that. One that makes me cringe every time I think of it. Thankfully, I was alone in the car when it happened.

I had just moved to Medford, and had previously had few, if any, reasons to take Rte. 2 west to 95.  I was headed to Waltham (this was in our Costco days) which meant 2W to 95S. After a couple of minutes on 95 I noticed that the Burlington Mall was on the wrong side of the road (and later learned it wasn't even along my expected route). I absolutely believe that any normal, functioning human being, on seeing the Burlington Mall on the left hand side of the road but expecting it to be on the right, would think "Oh, I'm going the wrong way." Totally normal reaction.  But me? I thought to myself, "Hey, when did they move the Burlington Mall?"

So you try waking up with this brain every morning.

January 17, 2011

I have struggled with how to recognize today: what would have been, and what should have been, Tom's 58th birthday.  So I thought I'd share some more moments. In no particular order:

This was Agent 96's first cous cous dinner. About a half-step lower on the spectrum than a Thanksgiving feast, cous cous dinners were a ritual at our home. In fact, on Kwaj we once had a cous cous feast instead of a Thanksgiving turkey dinner. Tom loved himself some Moroccan food. Tom loved himself food, and sharing it with his friends.

We had to put Neko to sleep in 1998, when she was 18 years old. I knew we'd be going to the vet later this day, and my heart knew Tom wouldn't get to hold her again. Poor little Neko looks comfortable in this photo, but she could barely stand, and could no longer walk. A few months before she died, Neko, who had taken to hanging out with Tom in the office (where Tom had jury-rigged a running water fountain out of a plastic box, an aquarium pump, and tubing) and increasingly tired of walking up and down two flights of stairs to the litter box, had taught herself to use the toilet. We were alone in the house one day, just Tom, sleeping 96, and I, when from the kitchen we heard someone using the bathroom upstairs. We looked at each other, and remarked upon it, but it wasn't until days later that we actually saw that little kitty sitting up there, assuming the position.






Oh, how we loved our tropical Christmases. And what better way to spend Christmas Eve than teaching your 4- and 5-year-olds how to drive? 

 This might be my actual, official wedding portrait ...

  ... but here, my friend Laura caught Tom speaking his vows  -- proof!  This is my favorite wedding photo.  In our church service a few months later, Fr. Hehir, unhappy that we used the same vows, tacked on to the end that God had put Tom in charge of family security, and put me in charge of the household. So whenever I'd ask Tom to take out the rubbish, he had to do it  ... because God said so!

About two weeks before we pcs'd from  Kwaj in 2002, Tom and I spent a long weekend in Pohnpei, FSM, where we visited Nan Madol. We met our friends Mooch and TOO (short for "The Other One") who let us stay in their thatched hut at The Village as long as we fed them.  I don't remember which is which, but I know they were fatter when we left than when we got there.

Our first visit to the Big Island, 1999.   Don't you love  96 & 98 all matchy-matchy like that?  I'd still put them in matching t-shirts if I could! This was moments before the dotcom bubble burst, and if we had had our checkbook with us the day we stepped off the plane on that vacation we would own a little piece of paradise today. And we would never have left.

Lake Mooselookmeguntic, Oquossoc, Maine. Tom had been going there with friends for years before we met, and I was quite honored the first time he invited me along. We went once with the kids in the early days, but were so mortified by "the great magic marker debacle of '99" that we were afraid to make reservations again until the summer of 2006. Ever wonder what to do if you find an unattended black magic marker?  Stop.  Don't touch.  Leave the area.  Tell an adult.

I don't know which was more of a chick magnet: the cool Daytona, or Maxwell. They're both pretty hot. Hmmmm ... all three of them were pretty hot, actually!

I treasure every moment, every memory.  The lifetime of moments that make the life of a man.

Dogproofing Fail

I remember the days when putting a cup on the coffee table got it safely out of reach. I remember scrambling to move stuff to the end table, because suddenly the coffee table no longer meant childproof. Then, to the kitchen table, or higher and higher on the stairs; or, God forbid, I'd have to put something away in order to ensure its safety.

If I wanted to have to childproof my home, I'd have had another baby, thankyouverymuch. Said baby wouldn't have stolen my leftover orange chicken, though, or eaten my Burt's Bees lip balm, container and all. Admittedly, the baby might have chewed through a rattle or two, and maybe an occasional bag of dog treats. But really, Zoet? Pipe insulation?

This is a straggler I just found under the couch.  I really hope this was an open can she found and thoughtfully cleaned for me, and not a can she opened herself.  Have I mentioned the dog only gets dry food?  The cats eat canned.  Miraculously, this treat did not require a followup visit to the vet.  But I predict this episode did not involve any learning, either (by either one of us.)

About the only pristine stuff in my house anymore: dog toys.  Man, they make that stuff to last!  The orange ball and the bone? Those came with Zoet in August.

Oops - gotta run. Duty calls ...

Dont Get Me Wrong

Don't get me wrong.  I love my kids.  This is not even a "I love my kids, but ..." post.

I love my kids.  Period.  Unconditionally.  Forever and always.  Blah, blah, blah.

I love my kids, but ... being the single mom of two teenage boys sucks.  Sucks bad.

I totally get that I'm not the first single parent in the world, or the only one.  I can't even use the excuse that I'm the least experienced one, since I've been going at it almost a year now.  I was raised by a pretty competent one, in fact, who also had two concurrent teenage boys.  And two simultaneous teenage girls.  But we were the sensible ones, so I like to think we mitigated a bit.  And when she was done with us, she still had one more left to go.

Argue all you want about politics, Agent 96, and society, and how people stink and there's no God, and go right ahead and argue that comic books are literature.  And yeah, you can even have input into bedtimes, and menus, and schedules, and extracurricular activities.  But this getting an argument about every little thing is getting really old really fast.  If I mention that we need a new couch, you know what would be totally awesome?

"Okay, Mom."