Good Lord, I have barely a week left to call the month of March a success. I did tackle the movie collection over the weekend and have decided we have questionable, at best, taste around here. I'm more than a bit embarassed to admit to the amount of bullet porn we have in my house. I suppose it was inevitable, considering that one cat and I are the only creatures living in this house without a measurable level of testosterone in our blood. I mean really, did Bridget Jones' Diary really have a fighting chance against Live Free Or Die Hard? Bullet porn, for those of you without teenage sons making your movie choices, are those movies that heavily feature "snappy" one liners, lingering close ups of various bits of weaponry, lovingly recorded rapid gunshots and a couple of guys. Throw in explosions, helicopters or better yet, exploding helicopters and you won't hear intelligible conversation from the male population of your house for days at a time. Good wholesome entertainment, for sure.
I managed to purge the vast majority of the VHS tapes, keeping only those very few that I haven't been able to find of DVD yet...keep your eyes open for a copy of "Noises Off" for me! I unloaded a dozen or so old "Rugrats" tapes on a co-worker and the rest are going to the library if they'll take them. Yay for me!
The basement is proving a much bigger problem, mainly because I'm refusing to do any of it by myself. We tend, as a group, to allow ourselves to become completely distracted by the air hockey game and lose most of our cleaning mojo as a result. However, I have become quite a force to be reckoned with as far as the game goes. But I digress, we're not here to discuss my formidable bar game skills, we were talking about the basement. We have managed to weed through roughly 8,731 strings of mini Christmas lights and ended up with four that actually work. Thank goodness that they go one sale for about a buck right after the holidays. I'm not entirely sure why half the Halloween decorations ended up in one of the Christmas decor boxes, I'm CONVINCED that we did not leave our Halloween stuff up until sometime after Thanksgiving...that would be the sign of a true procrastinator, and that is not me. Stop giggling, I'm serious here. Remember the keys I threw away? Found out what #3 was meant to unlock, there's a mysterious storage cabinet in a far corner of that basement that none of us could even begin to remember what we put into it that made a lock necessary. Huge bummer. After several phone calls to Dan's buddies, we located a bolt cutter, wrestled the mangled lock out of it home and opened to cabinet. I admit to some rather breathless excitement as we opened the door to find...all the leftover paint from when we first bought the house. Do you know what happened to Latex paint after about seven years? The majority if it congeals into a dumpling-like mass at the bottom of the can while the rest of it clings, mosslike and stringy, to the rim of the can. Those colors that look so great on your walls look pretty unappetizing in this form. Again, I sorely regret my key-tossing into the trash. I know those other three are going to haunt me, I can feel them, reaching out to me from the landfill, following me and waiting, waiting so very patiently until each key's true purpose has been revealed and I have been punished. You'll see.
The basement is about halfway to the goal and we have one weekend left in this month, cross your fingers. All that's left for the other project is to weed through the CD collection and make sure the cases and the contents match...no problem!
Something weird is going on in my bedroom, I think I need to buy new humidifiers next fall because I don't think they're keeping up very well. My Zen fountain (now that it's actually put together properly) runs beautifully and is as soothing as advertised, but it seems to be going through a lot more water than a recirculating fountain should. We have forced air heat in the house and the furnace runs quite a bit, so I'm guessing it's simply that dry in my house. I know it is, the boys love nothing more that getting off the couch or out of the recliner and carefully making their way around the room, touching nothing, until they can sneak up behind an unsuspecting member of the household and give them a good zap to the ear. Anyway, I have another reason to look forward to spring, I won't need to add water to the fountain as often as I do now.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Happy Easter?
Today is Easter Sunday, for those of raised in that tradition, the day of renewal, ressurection and lots and lots of sugar. I love that this one of the biggest days in those Christian faiths but is TOTALLY based on the pagan calendar. Easter is always the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. If that ain't pagan, I don't know what is. But we're not going to talk about that now, are we? Traditionally, Easter has been that hallmark of the coming season of renewal, the tulips and crocus should be poking theit first tentative shoots out of the ground. Or, we can get slammed with another six inches of snow. Fine, be that way. I'll pull my parka over my soft, floaty pastel skirt and twinset. I'll forgo the peeptoe pumps for my boots, no Easter bonnets for us, we're still wearing the Floyd R. Turbo hats with the earflaps.
Several years ago, when my nephew was going to a rather steadfast Christain daycare (I think he was about four) and his sister was going to the Catholic school down the street, they both came home just before Easter with the spoils from their respective Easter celebrations. My niece happily showed her jellybeans, chocolate eggs and Peeps while my nephew revealed his treasures. He brought home a number of small plastic eggs and prepared to enjoy his own booty. One can imagine his confusion when his eggs revealed, not jellybeans and chocolate, but items such as a rock, a thorn, a nail, a bit of purple cloth and a penny wrapped in tinfoil. He looked dismayed, to say the very least. Casey had received a set of ressurection eggs as opposed to the expected trove of candy. Look them up and imagine being four and getting this lot. My family, being more than a bit sacreligious from time to time, spent the holiday quoting the scene from "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" when they all look into their bags and announce, "I got a candy bar!", "I got an apple!" and poor Charlie Brown, with his bedsheet full of badly placed eyeholes, announced, "I got a rock." Poor Casey, I think at seventeen, he's since recovered.
We have our own set of traditions, the newest of which involves a couple of dozen Peeps (you know, the bright yellow marshmallow chicks that no one really eats but have become an Easter fixture) and the microwave oven. We have established that two Peeps, nuked at the same time, will actually expand to roughly ten times their normal size and build up enough pressure to move a Pyrex 2-cup measuring cup. The cup is in place to prevent Peep shrapnel from plastering the inside of the microwave with yellow goo upon reaching maximum volume. Maybe a non-traditional commemoration of the holiday, but a whole lot of fun. We did the usual hiding of the eggs thing, plastic and filled with candy, not hard-boiled and dyed. We eschewed the hard boiled because no one in the house likes them and the fact that I fear salmonella. I know what you're thinking, none of us ever died from eating eggs that sat out overnight, but now that I'm an adult...gross. Add my psychopathic cats into the mix and I could easily see some kind of egg massacre going on while we slept. As it was, they seemed to have unearthed a few of the eggs overnight and played kitty hockey with them. The scattered remains of several mini Reeses and stray Hershey miniatures wrappers mixed in the cat yark this morning certainly told the tale. Both of them are currently in a post sugar crash coma on the back of the couch. I mean really, could you resist basking in the sun while on your comedown from a sugar high? By the way, never give a dog jellybeans...the endless chewing will drive you slowly insane, more effective than waterboarding as a form of torture, methinks. So we've adapted the Easter as a time of experimentation and non-traditional observations, I'm sure you all have your own holiday weirdness at your house.
Time to go out and shovel the driveway...happy Spring?
Several years ago, when my nephew was going to a rather steadfast Christain daycare (I think he was about four) and his sister was going to the Catholic school down the street, they both came home just before Easter with the spoils from their respective Easter celebrations. My niece happily showed her jellybeans, chocolate eggs and Peeps while my nephew revealed his treasures. He brought home a number of small plastic eggs and prepared to enjoy his own booty. One can imagine his confusion when his eggs revealed, not jellybeans and chocolate, but items such as a rock, a thorn, a nail, a bit of purple cloth and a penny wrapped in tinfoil. He looked dismayed, to say the very least. Casey had received a set of ressurection eggs as opposed to the expected trove of candy. Look them up and imagine being four and getting this lot. My family, being more than a bit sacreligious from time to time, spent the holiday quoting the scene from "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" when they all look into their bags and announce, "I got a candy bar!", "I got an apple!" and poor Charlie Brown, with his bedsheet full of badly placed eyeholes, announced, "I got a rock." Poor Casey, I think at seventeen, he's since recovered.
We have our own set of traditions, the newest of which involves a couple of dozen Peeps (you know, the bright yellow marshmallow chicks that no one really eats but have become an Easter fixture) and the microwave oven. We have established that two Peeps, nuked at the same time, will actually expand to roughly ten times their normal size and build up enough pressure to move a Pyrex 2-cup measuring cup. The cup is in place to prevent Peep shrapnel from plastering the inside of the microwave with yellow goo upon reaching maximum volume. Maybe a non-traditional commemoration of the holiday, but a whole lot of fun. We did the usual hiding of the eggs thing, plastic and filled with candy, not hard-boiled and dyed. We eschewed the hard boiled because no one in the house likes them and the fact that I fear salmonella. I know what you're thinking, none of us ever died from eating eggs that sat out overnight, but now that I'm an adult...gross. Add my psychopathic cats into the mix and I could easily see some kind of egg massacre going on while we slept. As it was, they seemed to have unearthed a few of the eggs overnight and played kitty hockey with them. The scattered remains of several mini Reeses and stray Hershey miniatures wrappers mixed in the cat yark this morning certainly told the tale. Both of them are currently in a post sugar crash coma on the back of the couch. I mean really, could you resist basking in the sun while on your comedown from a sugar high? By the way, never give a dog jellybeans...the endless chewing will drive you slowly insane, more effective than waterboarding as a form of torture, methinks. So we've adapted the Easter as a time of experimentation and non-traditional observations, I'm sure you all have your own holiday weirdness at your house.
Time to go out and shovel the driveway...happy Spring?
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