Tell It To COACHIE

So, we’re moving again, which means preparing for the move, which in my OCD profile means that I must lay hands on absolutely everything that we own. On the one hand, we moved less than 2 years ago and we had a big de-crappifying yard sale, so we’re not totally swimming in excess junk. On the other hand, we moved less than 2 years ago, and apparently my brain needs a lot longer than that to recover between moves. I am so mentally exhausted from doing stuff like this:

Dear teachers, dentists, firefighters, doctors, librarians, nutritionists, police dogs, etc.,
Please just give my kids candy. My mother keeps them in pencils.
love, Shannon

The guest/toy room is always the worst. At first I was glad there were 2 closets in there, because I could close them and hide the mess. Unfortunately, 22 months of closing them and hiding the mess eventually has to end. After 3 days, I’ve come up with this:

And this:

I did not match up Barbie’s shoes. I am making progress!?

The food is up high to protect it from bears. Actually the food is up high to protect it from kiddies, so that I don’t end up with sad little toys like this:

I can’t find 2 plastic cookies or the other half of this velcro broccoli. I don’t know which is sadder, the fact that I know what plastic food is missing or the amount of energy I have expended trying to find it.

Of course if the kiddies can’t reach the food, they are more than willing to occupy their time pulling out other random things like this:

Yes, we must get a good look at Mommy’s college classmates before we can possibly get ready for school. I have come to the conclusion that as I lay my hands on everything we own, I leave behind a magical sparkly aura that induces my kiddies to come along behind me and then attempt to lay their hands on everything we own.

Case in point: the other day my neighbor called and asked me to let her dog out. I jotted down the location of their spare key on a post-it on the desk. The next day I sat down at the desk and noticed my note, which said “deer head in shed” and had 3 marker swirls at the bottom. I thought it would make a funny little post, about how I’m leaving cryptic little notes to myself and how every scrap of paper in the house has marker swirls on it because I’m testing every marker I find before clearing it for the move.

This morning I went to take a picture of the note, and it is gone. So is the pack of post-its. Why could they possibly need my “deer head in shed” post-it? I think maybe I’ll e-mail Alberto Gonzales to see if it is legal to keep your children handcuffed while at home.

The other major problem these days? Let’s see if you can guess. What do these items have in common?

They are all things that the ants who invaded our house over spring break did not infiltrate. All other cereal, crackers, candy, etc. - in the trash.

Of course, I always try to have as little food as possible in the house when moving day arrives, so I must admit that the ants are being more helpful than the children. We’ve had the exterminator out here twice, but still the ants reappear.

Now I must return to the sorting before the little varmints return. Any of them.

When we got our Wii this Christmas, one of the games we got to go with it was “de Blob.” I had seen a commercial for it on TV, and since I am easily manipulated, I decided we needed it. It turns out to be a really, really fun game, but unfortunately it is more of a one person game than Wii Sports or Mario Kart, so the kiddies don’t choose to play it too often. When they do, I always come out and sit on the couch, because I know sooner or later they are going to ask me for help and pass me the remote. I am awesome at de Blob.

For those of you who don’t know the game, basically the evil INKT Corporation has taken over Chroma City and removed all the color. You, as de Blob, jump all over the buildings and gardens, etc., repainting everything. When you paint a whole block of buildings, you liberate the Raydians, the citizens of the town who have been turned into Graydians. You basically throw your blobby self all over the place, do challenges, and the more different items you pick up, the more patterns, music, etc., you bring to the city. And here I will bow my head and pray that is both the longest and the last video game summary you will find posted here by me.

Anyhoo, little did I know that my world would one day become Chroma City (and that I would be the blob inhabiting). Unfortunately, in order to activate our joyful plans to shake the dust of MO from our feet, we must return our house to its original state. We painted almost every room of this house, because we thought we were going to be here for 3 years. Now, less than 2 years later, the thought of painting over all of our hard work makes me sort of sad, but particularly the kiddies’ rooms because I spent A LOT of time painting them. If you are not Erin, Doug, Kate, or one of the kiddies’ grandparents, you never got to see my handiwork. And you never will. In person that is. Here is Marty’s room:

Using a protractor (yes, a protractor - I’m not sure which is weirder, that we have a protractor or that I was able to lay my hands on it within a few weeks of moving) I cut a wave shape out of a manilla folder and then used it as a stencil all the way around his room I’m sure there is an easier way to do this, as well as an easier way to make sure it stays level (my way was repeatedly measuring the height from the floor to the folder in a most OCD manner). Anyway, in the end I was able to keep it level, and I was happy with the way it turned out. The kiddies call Marty’s bed “the boat” because the height of the waves makes his bed look like it’s floating. I chose that height very carefully - based on my strong conviction that the waves must be higher than the window sill so wouldn’t have to paint waves on that wall too.

The HP found these old decorative wooden fish I had when I was single and put them up on the wall. Of course, whenever things get very exciting back there, the fish get knocked off the wall, but when the room is straightened up and no one is in it, the fish look really cute.

************************************************************************

Remember that paint I had to pick up in the snow storm? Yes, well Marty’s room, sadly has been returned to its Army issue/institutional FLW white. So has our room, although I hadn’t really done any special painting back there. But I still have the front of the house and the kitchen, and for a few more weeks I’ve got the girls room.

Aislinn wanted blue, Lauren wanted pink, so I talked them into this stripey thing, and if I thought the wave was a lot of trouble, let me tell you, measuring stripes all the way around their room was even worse. I have mostly blocked out how I did it, except I know it involved a lot of tape and time with the electric level, but I promise you that the stripes are very straight - I’ve never been sent running from the room in horror because I noticed a deviant stripe. The tape was 1.5 inches, so the stripes are 3, 4.5, or 6 inches. It took me forever to come up with the pattern of stripes and then what colors to paint them (the height, once again, was based on the window sill). And then when I was done I was disappointed because I pictured the stripes on a white background, and as you can see, the background is not white.

You can probably tell that the girls’ bed conglomeration is rather heavy. Once it was in place, I couldn’t move it, and after measuring stripes around most of the room, I decided I could not face trying to make level stripes while squashed in behind the bed. That’s why the stripes just end in that weird stripe up to the window. I realize now that if I hadn’t shown you this picture, no one would have ever known.

The painted rooms look clean, but cold. Martin has already requested new waves for his new room in Kentucky, and I have to agree with him. It is a big pain in the behind, but the paint just makes everything seem more like home.

The HP arrived home tonight from Ft. Knox, a place that 4 years ago, was our home. I was looking at some pictures today of our life in Ft. Knox, and it was definitely a simpler time, and a happy one. Ft. Knox is also the last place where I attended an “officers’ wives’ coffee” (oh my, the possessive of that phrase is a minefield, heh)*. When we first arrived there, the HP was a captain, and his job was, well, I have no idea, but the coffee group associated with his job was all wives of colonels, lieutenant colonels, the occasional major, and one other captain (you may know her from reading here, her name is Becky).

I had attended coffees prior to life at Ft. Knox, but Ft. Knox was the first place where another wife flat out asked me my husband’s job and rank, and then, having found my answer unsatisfactory, turned on her heel mid-conversation, and walked away to find someone more acceptable to speak to. I was speechless. She turned around a second later, after she realized how bad it looked, and mumbled something about how she needed to speak to so and so about their daughters’ riding lessons. Okey dokey then. That is about the time that I lost interest in the whole officers’ wives’ coffee thing, but I continued to go, since you are supposed to, until they tightened up their invite list and cleared out the riffraff (me and Becky).

The house where that happened?

Yeah. Apparently 8 years of ranch houses and double wides later, that house is now going to be my house. I don’t know if we’ve got the furniture to fill it, I don’t know if we deserve it, but I can tell you this: If some captain’s wife with small children comes to my door for any reason, I will immediately hand her a margarita and a magazine, and take her little bundles of joy off to the toy room for some good old fashioned deconstruction.

* I’m not antisocial, the HP just hasn’t had a job where the coffees were applicable.

One of the many things I will not miss about life in Missouri is my stinking stovetop. It slopes so badly from front to back that whenever I’m trying to saute anything I have to repeatedly spin the pan around to keep the oil from pooling in the back. I don’t know if it has gotten worse, or if I just haven’t made pancakes in a really long time*, but this past Sunday the batter was running all over the place, and few of the pancakes were very round. See?

But as I gazed at this batch of pancakes, suddenly it seemed like I was receiving a message from the great beyond. Does this picture remind you of anything?**

Maybe this?

This is not my only recent Bert and Ernie encounter. Last August, at my final pre-exile-to-Missouri Team Trivia at Station 7 (go there, try everything), the final question was “Who were the first two muppets to appear on Sesame Street?” I don’t know how I knew, but somewhere in my brain I did - it was Ernie and Bert. We were the only team in the bar that got it right. This is no small feat, because a bunch of the teams are competitive, and even when you know the right answer, you’ve still got to convince your whole team full of highly educated, well-read, accomplished, opinionated and stubborn people to believe you.

Jim Henson has always been one of my heroes, someone I would name if I was ever asked what three famous people I would like to have dinner with (I think the other two would be Conan O’Brien and Abraham Lincoln). I think that if he had lived longer, the world would be a better place, and I’m not just saying that now, I’ve thought it for years, and nothing I’ve read or seen about him has even slightly changed my mind.

I’m now off to research a dissertation on Ernie and Bert, to see if they have something to tell me. I mean, besides this:

and this:

(crappy quality, I know, but catchy song)

* I think the problem was they were made with skim milk instead of buttermilk. They looked more like crepes than pancakes.

** Pancakes will be up for bidding on ebay soon…

Last spring I tutored a “troubled” high school student in chemistry.  I was a little worried that I would not be much help, since these days I can only think of two instances where I regularly use any knowledge gained in chemistry.  One of these is mixtures - it is always best to start with a little bit of liquid to dissolve something, and then add the rest of the liquid to make the mixture.  As a result, $70,000 worth of education later, I am awesome at making chocolate milk.  The other one, is rinsing out eyes.

On your first day in Chemistry Lab 101, they show you all of the safety equipment in the room, explain how to use it, and then threaten you with such dire consequences if you ever misuse it, that most students probably die or go blind while debating whether or not the “emergency” threshold has been reached.   Our lab had fire extinguishers, mercury cleanup kits, the pull-chain activated emergency shower (that supposedly dumps 1000s of gallons of water on you at once, but since we were all so afraid to use it, I think probably there was no actual plumbing attached), and the “eye wash” station, which looks like a blue water fountain.  The lab techs emphasized over and over that when you get something in your eye, your immediate reaction is to clamp it shut, which is the worst thing to do.  So they told us if we saw someone at the eye wash station in distress, we should go over there and pull his or her eye open.

When I was in grade school, I saw this horrific, life-altering movie about what happens to your eye balls if you accidentally shoot fireworks into them.  It was so gross that a few students left the room puking.  In fact, it was so gross that today’s parents would probably sue the school for showing it.  When I started college, I would still inwardly cringe whenever I thought about any kind of eye injury.  Obviously, the eye wash station procedures were slightly out of my comfort zone.  But over the years, the more news stories I heard about people throwing acid at other people, the more I figured I should try to practice running water into my eyes, just in case.  And now, I’m happy to say, I’m pretty good at it.  Fortunately, the worst thing I’ve gotten into my eyes is shampoo.  Until the other day.

DUN DUN DUN

I understand that people need jobs, and changing packaging keeps the packaging designers and marketing people employed, but every new innovation in the packaging of spices makes it harder and harder to get them out of the jar.  The other night, I was attempting to get 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper out of a brand-new, over-filled, jar, and it spilled all over the counter.  I wiped it up with a wet paper towel and continued with my recipe, when suddenly the skin under my eye began to burn.  I sort of absentmindedly rubbed it with my finger, and it began to feel worse.  Oh, how I wish that improved powers of observation  were one of the things I learned from Chemistry class.  After thoughtlessly rubbing my eye a few more times, I realized the problem was cayenne pepper, I had it on my finger, and I had finally succeeded in rubbing it into my eyeball.

Guess what?  It really hurt.  A lot.  I don’t recommend it.  If anyone ever shows me a photo of pepper spray, I’ll probably turn and run.  Fortunately, I had been training for just this moment for years.  I made my way to the sink, shoved the dirty dishes aside, used one hand to keep my hair out of the muck, and washed my eye out.  Success!  A few minutes later, as I continued with dinner, I realized that maybe I should wash my hands too, to avoid a repeat scenario - there’s some critical thinking right?

The next time I took out the cayenne, it spilled all over the counter again, but this time I managed not to mace myself.  I’m thinking of suing the McCormick people, but until I prevail, consider yourselves warned.  And consider yourselves on your own, because I’m pretty sure I still would not be able to pull someone else’s eye open, and I don’t plan to practice.