I Saved My Spouse's Life, Avoiding Medical Machinery

THE MOST SACRED OF RELIGIOUS HOLIDAYS

Here it is! Saint Valentine’s Day!  My annual deadline to ensure every last Christmas decoration is put away, and I am proud to say, I overachieved this year!  I got everything finalized by January 18^th!  (Despite the fact that this was an act of pure ‘distraction,’ I still give myself credit.)

Friday, January 18^th was the last day of a multi-day outpatient process where my husband went to Dana Farber to enjoy alien-technology where they removed his entire blood volume every hour – from one arm – then poured it inside a machine that resembled a Xerox copier from the 1970s where it was agitated and strained by a high-tech sieve which pulled out millions of baby stem cells that were funneled into a secret glove-compartment, after which a separate wing of the machine poured all the leftovers back into a completely different arm of my husband. 

Magic!

Then this process began again. Every hour.  Six hours per day.  On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, until he resembled Mina from Dracula, only with a beard. 

Fortunately, this process resulted in the successful harvest of sufficient baby stem cells for future immune-system transplants that will keep his myeloma disorder controlled for several years to come.

My husband’s 'harvest nurse' -- we'll call her Nurse Van-Helsing -- asked why I did not accompany him during his ten hour per day, three-day stem cell collection process.

Well.  First of all, there were far too many Christmas decorations for me to abandon simply to observe a Xerox machine remove my husband’s entire blood volume and re-circulate it every hour while he snored.

More importantly:  if you have reviewed my posts about the manner in which machinery behaves when I get near it, you will understand that my distant-proximity likely saved his life.

Multiple ex-teaching colleagues can testify to my ... misadventures...with photocopiers in particular. I was the one that irreparably jammed the feeder-tray to the point where the copier sucked paper into its own motor, then re-programmed itself to laminate its light-proof cover onto the glass plate beneath.

Once the school’s smoke alarm triggers from fumes caused by molten steel and melted glass -- and an  evacuation-order from the mayor gets issued --  repairmen and EMTs are swiftly spirited to the scene.

It was in my husband’s best interests that I not be near the zip code of the vampiric machinery extracting his blood volume.

What turned out to be a successful “stem cell collection” is due exclusively to those Christmas decorations loitering about my house like vandals. (Thank God for Christmas. Go Mary!) 

I spent many a content stem cell collection hour wrapping scores of hanging wreaths and puffy snowmen and crystal Santas and ceramic trees. They even required new boxes.  The old ones seemed dusty. So OFF to liquor stores I traipsed for empty cases that once housed up to 20 one-litre bottles of elixirs for the damned, but now cradle delicate dangling tree balls and scores of Baby Jesi.

My deco-distraction not only ensured a successful future transplant for my husband, it spared Dana Farber what I am certain is a king’s ransom in vampire-machinery replacement.

So today, on Saint Valentine’s Day, I am able to focus my amorous attention on a NEW annual deadline:  I have until my 2:30 chiropractor appointment to finish up a few post-Christmas errands. Tasks I have anticipated for weeks will go so poorly, I’ve rehearsed response-dialogue in my mind, between me and proprietors, that justify ‘exceptions-to-policy.”

------------------------------------------

Take my checkbook. 

Why not? There’s been nothing in it since New Year’s Day but fading, sticky stubs. I lost my checkbook re-order form, so we’ve been withdrawing cash from an ATM card all this time.  I have avoided what I know will be a tense convo with my teller:

“Good morning, Mrs. Given, how can I help you?”

"Hi, Ellen!  Hey, I lost my order form for my checks... can we just order without it?"

“Hmm.  Wait a minute.”  -- consults with colleagues for several minutes; six frowning faces turn in unison to glower at me –

 “Carolyn, pull around and park out back, near the dumpster where there’s space. We can’t do this in the drive-through.  Meanwhile, I’ll send a wire to my supervisor for  corporate policy on how we can POSSIBLY--”

In my scenario, I drive to the post office instead.

"Good morning, Tom!  Can you believe I lost all my stamps when I put away the Christmas things? They’re probably inside boxes of Christmas cards I thought I needed but, suddenly, it was Martin Luther King Day. I need to pay bills with stamps cuz I’m boycotting online payments since they locked me out of their programs because I forgot my passwords. I enjoy paying my internet provider with paper envelopes and stamps since it costs THEM money to hire staff to open MAIL and process my payme—”

Tom snaps his Customer Service window shut, edits his lunch-hour sign to read, "9-to-10" adding a sentence fragment about some diabetic issue Tom clearly does not have, evidenced by six root beer-empties lining his now-empty station.

Finally, my imaginary mission takes me to a local department store – Store X – to return four Hefty-Sized bags of Christmas Present Clothing I apparently bought for myself during a particularly low self-esteem day.

"Hello, Customer Service. I HATE these items I bought in a moment of despair because your mailbox circular lured me in with an alleged SALE -- and while I realize I should have tried s this stuff on, YOU try this on December 24th with your sales-staff staggering about with overflowing nasal passages complaining of fever and dysentery. I was so afraid of contracting flu and bringing it home to my immune-compromised spouse, I grabbed a ton of mismarked merchandise while staving off contagions by wrapping my ski jacket around my face.  The resulting hypoxia caused SUCH oxygen-deprivation, my vision was impaired so I had no idea most of these pieces were missing things like hems.  And tags with sizes. Do I look like an XXLong XXWide to you? Which brings me to THIS (holding up a cocktail dress the size of a tampon).  How was this supposed to help me celebrate New Year’s Eve?  I brought it as a hostess gift to a party with a nine-year old girl and she couldn’t even get her Barbie’s THIGH into it.

 “Oh, I DID put to use the ‘excellent-consumer bonus points’ you awarded me -- so in addition to getting 60 per cent off things already marked down, I got an EXTRA 30 per cent off. But did you really expect my husband to believe the sales receipt when it said we saved fifteen THOUSAND dollars?

“He was none-too-pleased I paid $589.00 for things I have to return, but get this:  your folks from corporate in some confederate state that should never have made it into the Union sent me a bill that was due before I tried anything on!

 “To avoid the 21 per cent interest, I paid half this bill – and now I owe interest on the other half -- for merchandise I am returning today.

“And thanks for giving me Counterfeit Store-X Bucks I was excited about using after the holidays. And I quote: 'For every $50 you spend before Christmas, you earn  $10 Store-X Bucks!'  Well -- I didn't notice I had to spend my $110 Bucks between December 27th and January 2. This is the worst annual week of my life, with all the house guests and the twelve step meetings someone invariably must be driven to and—"

By the time I get to my errands, I'm too exhausted from my internal dialogue to organize a Post-Christmas To Do list.

---------------------------------------------

Which brings me back to Saint Valentine’s Day.

Fortunately, this hallowed religious holiday celebrates the ingestion of seratonin-releasing, endorphin spiking chocolate, fizzy champagne, expensive steak and its byproducts and, for us, an evening of post Dana-Farber Medieval-Machinery Blood Harvest GAMBLIN in Connecticut.  It would be sacrilegious to focus on a different religious holiday today.

Which means, I have until Saint Patrick’s Day to attend my straggling post-Christmas errands.

If I have learned one thing from my mother’s brushes with various incurable disorders and my husband’s myeloma, it is to be flexible. Nay, fluid. I can flex these errands all the way out to All Saints Day on October 31^st.

So on this holy day, I wish to everyone a spiritual Saint Valentine’s Day. Remember to ignore your errands and focus heavily on alcohol abuse, the art of physical love, and a lot of dark chocolate – especially if you are single -- the way that God and Hallmark intended.

Amen.

Pizza SO Easy to Make, You Hardly Need Ingredients

Nephew Tim Who Reads My Blog:  this is WEINER PIZZA
Tim says, "Go easy on the mustard."

 1/29/2013  

Dear Nick, Jake, Zach, Abby, Jonathan,

Okay, Real Quick!    

TODAY'S pizza crust recipe contains several secret ingredients -- likely dangerous -- because I ran out of flour. But the things I used to replace the flour created the most amazing, low-gluten, crispy, healthful pizza crust. So I must share my process.  

Ready?

After I added water to two teaspoons of yeast from an industrial-sized canister I bought, in bulk, at a co-op, (it is the size of a Kia Sportage but more expensive) a scary thing happened:  the yeast and warm water formed a wet clot ...much like from an episode of House, only more grey. And pulsating.

So I consulted the BreadMaker Appliance Guide to see where I went afoul.

Using hostile tones, the Guide informed me that the yeast MUST remain dry, at all times, inside a flour-well that I was to make with my thumb. Then, much, MUCH later, I was to add water, but so far away from the yeast that it might as ‘well’ be located in Ethiopia (which is the birthplace of my new favorite barley which is cooked with its own edible husk, and is a wonderful substitute for broken pizza crust).

At this point, I was supposed to hit the BreadMaker’s START button so as to allow the marvels of mechanization to mix the water and flour – and very separate yeast – safely.

So clear was the manufacturer’s BreadMaker Guide that the coldest water possible was to be added to the mixture, I had to wonder what made me add warm water to the yeast in the first place.

Well. It was the directions on the Industrial Sized Canister itself.

"Measure warm water, 38 to 43 degrees Celsius (? uh oh)  amounting to four times the weight of dry active yeast into a container then add yeast slowly with continuous stirring until yeast is completely suspended using as you would Compressed Yeast."

Realizing too late this was written without punctuation in a French-Canadian accent (note the UK-style 'U' in 'contin-u-ous'), I recognized that I never needed to suspend anything but my crust-building activity.

But I especially didn’t need to compress my yeast until it approximated a Canadian metric measurement amounting to four times the weight of a Celsius canister. "Too late now," I said and dumped the yeast-clot onto the flour.

The proportions looked wrong to my mathematically-trained eye. That and the fact that the ‘dough’ fell more accurately within the “cake batter” category – which is how I recognized I had added only three, not four, of the prescribed cups of flour. 

Because that was all I had.

So I added a combination of Ground Flax Seed Meal, Whole Oats, and Whole Fiber Food Powder leftover from my Chiropractor-Prescribed Standard Process Purification-Shakes ... to amount to One Cup.  

Mommy's Dough Ball:  "The Color Purple"

That is when the 'dough ball' turned purple. (See photo)      --------- >>>>>>>>

So I read the Whole Food Fiber Powder Container for its ingredients and learned it is comprised of oat fiber, brown rice bran, carrot root, apple pectin, beet fiber, beet root, whole beet, beet root fiber, purple extract from beets, and beets, plus six grams of 'Proprietary Blend.'

I blame the purple on 'Proprietary Blend.'

The dough ball is rising now ... but not very high.  Actually ... not at all.  

I blame the Canadians.

I am baking it with homemade pizza sauce made of chopped tomato and my own Proprietary Blend of home-grown herbs -- ‘proprietary’ because I lost the tags that identify them, but I THINK they might be 'spicy oregano', 'peppermint', 'rosemary', and 'beet root fiber'.

My toppings will be green pepper, onion, garlic and tofu, then I am covering it in Fiesta Cheese Blend. (I know ...it was almost vegan)

I will use Douglas House O' Pizza Dough-Pulling Skills I learned from Zach and Abby when they worked there (I wonder if they’re hiring now. The restaurant, not my kids, although I do support nepotism and give generously whenever I can). 

If that doesn’t work, I shall employ a religious laying on of hands or rolling pin or Nick’s Nissan Maxima … onto the dough (covered first by sterile wax paper). Then I shall press the crust onto a clay pizza stone ... where it will rise while I recycle things at the dump because Oh Look It's Tuesday.

I will let you know this afternoon what happened!  So far, it looks like it's going to be delicious. I will make it again for all of us when next we are together (sans cheese for my vegans and the lactose-intolerant, avec coconut flour for the gluten-sensitive, and avec pork tallow for my carnivore).

Love, 

Mom

Jake:  I love that you started this out with "Real Quick."   ?? 

Jonathan: Real Quick...let me transcribe the Dead Sea Scrolls . . . Then Isaiah begat Joshua.  Joshua begat Abraham. . . I'll call when I get off the pike to see if a call into Douglas House O Pizza is necessary.

Abby:  Dad if you’re calling D-HOP get their meatball calzones.  Yum!!

Zach:  Agreed, Abby, also try 'The Huxtable' named after my band.

Nick:  You’re using my Maxima to cook?  *Unsubscribe*

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

DEAR FAMILY,

I decided to bake my pizza Real Quick and eat it myself, due to everyone’s support. SOO delicious there are only 2 slices left, which I am saving as apps for the cat.

Oh, the red vegan-looking discs that resemble pepperoni in the photo?  They're pepperoni.

The Most Delicious Thing My Family Will Never Eat

But they are turkey pepperoni. 

This is the most healthful, delish pizza ever even though it harbors dairy-style cheese and not the kind made from  nutritional yeast and cashews, and faux pork byproduct and not the kind made from pig or soy clots.

I am only sorry that it can never be made again.  Mistakes like this happen once in a lifetime.

By the way, unrisen crust – as unholy as this sounds – is far better than crust which has risen, Amen.  If everyone is very good in their email responses to Mommy, mayhaps I will replicate this crust for Passover, which I am celebrating in Rhode Island, upon my holy conversion.  Unsubscribe that.

Shalom

How to Make Statistics... I mean Fake Statistics... no, wait: How To TAKE Statistics (as a course)

Who Put the Moby in my Mobius Strip?

   Somewhere along the line, I’ve accumulated an unnatural number of graduate credits in Teacher Education.  Either 29 or 31.  I can’t recall.  

   Technically, this is enough for a master’s degree, but I don’t have one of those.  

   Whenever I am asked if I hold this credential, I explain, “Well, not that specific credential. But I do hold a Post Baccalaureate Diploma in Teacher Education.  With either 29 or 31 credits. I forget.”

    I intend never to acquire a master’s degree.  To do that, I would have to take a course called Research Methods.  I choose to allow those methods to forever remain a mystery.

     A couple of ex-principals and some offspring of mine regularly suggest I take this class to finish up.  My eldest recently said during an animated phone conversation, “Really, Mom? You still haven’t taken this class?”

   We were discussing his sister and a class she needs, Research Methods and Statistics, which I had advised her to drop.  Not only because I, personally, could not help her should she have trouble. But because she was overloaded at 19 credits, so she can take that course another time (a time located in another dimension, or one in which her mother finds gainful employment at Wendy's or the YMCA, to purchase her a tutor.)

    I explained this to Nick, very meticulously.  But he is not easily distracted.

   “Can we get back to you, Mom? You have all the coursework except this methods class. And a master’s credential is a marketing-tool you need.  Plus, Mom.  Can you deny that you have the time now, to take this course?”

    I’m quite skilled, through practice, at my counter-argument. It approaches performance art.  The live version starts off with a glance heavenward, then I stoically proclaim, “A piece of paper…” (here I pause dramatically) “holds … no meaning … for me.” Then I drop my head and hold up a peace sign, allowing my high-mindedness to ferment. 

   Nick has been living with his marketing-director-fiancée for a couple of years now.  In Canada.  All of this makes him impossible to 'sell.'

    “Hey! Mom!” he said in tones reserved for redirecting miscreant thugs caught in acts of home-invasion. “YOU … (dramatic pause) … are not … a hippie. You and Dad got married in a church – a sanctioned social institution using a paper license and a legit minister.  You took out a mortgage. You guys are so deep into The System, you practically define ‘The Man.’ You’re not part of The Solution, Mom. You’re pretty much The Problem.”

   He certainly was not going to persuade me to take research and statistics by calling me The Man. My God, I’m a registered Democrat.

     I wish my commitment to not acquiring this credential were grounded in idyllic hippie morality.  Like going bra-less.  Or sprinkling hallucinogenic fungi on breakfast bark.

   The fact is, I’m scared of math.  Specifically, statistics. 

   

   Now I realize that I use math, possibly statistics, each day of my life.  I roll the dice and defy laws of decency and probability by speeding on the interstate while talking on my cellphone without getting arrested (well, for the last six years, anyway).

    And statistical-discourse flows like fluent drool from my tongue.  I can fold words like ‘variable’ and ‘probably’ inside almost any sentence.   

   I even possess a rudimentary knowledge of what a rhombus is, (something round involving onomatopoeia, rhom, rhom, rhommmmm bu-bu-busssss, which is a sound used to start mowers.)

   Once, a small group of math students at my charter school found me so worthy of their respect, they made me a Mobius Strip for my birthday! I found it so elegant (another math term) I brought it to my jeweler to have him copy its shape and make me a broach, inlaid with twelve of my birthstones.

   As it turned out, he couldn’t ‘twist’ the shape correctly.  He ended up making me an infinity sign, which was fine, because – due to my respect for math – I am a staunch supporter of infinity.

   This pin catches peoples’ eyes all the time when I wear it.  I am constantly asked which cancer-cure I am promoting.  “All of them,” I say.  “This pin represents ‘immortality’.” (Due to mathematics, this is even correct.)

    One last point: I have committed to memory the first seven components of the mathematical configuration known deliciously as “Pi.” I say ‘seven’ because I include the decimal-point as a ‘component’ out of deference to math, because -- as even I know --without a decimal point, mathematics would be way less precise.

   Anyway, every March 14, my charter school celebrated Pi Day. As a humanities teacher, I had my literature students collaborate on a poem centered in the theme of Pi. One year the particular charter school I worked for was concurrently celebrating The Year Of Interdisciplinary-Pretense. (The theme always changed, depending on which theory the state’s Department of Education elected as that year's 'Best Practice' during beverage-intensive summer galas.)  -- flash --  Please read a sobering treatise on Best Practices at the link below, written by my dear friend Bill Calhoun, a physics teacher (physics is loosely connected to math).   

     
      http://teachingframework.blogspot.com/2012/12/best-practices.html  

      

     So to participate in Pi Day while, of course, being an Interdisciplinary Team Player, I had my English students create a rap which they thoughtfully published on various bathroom walls located  throughout the school.

   “Three point one four one five nine

     gallops on our Number Line.

    To the right these numbers go,

     toward in fin it y they flow.

     Pi is awesome,

     not a fluke!

     Like pork pi 

     which

     makes

     us

     puke.”

  I was nominated for Interdisciplinary Blasphemer that year.

    

  Anyway, my son was not successful at convincing me that a course in Research Methods (which invariably involves statistics) would be worth it, in order that I acquire that elusive master’s credential.

   But guess what did convince me!

   A party for dozens of 14-year-olds, thrown by my niece and her parents for her birthday.

   This party supplied endless subjects for academic research, in every major discipline, with multiple opportunities to toss in statistics.  (I’m not even concerned with mathematical accuracy, due to extra-credit.  My working-title, “Field Fest For Forty Fourteen-Year Olds,” could earn up to ten bonus points in alliteration.)  But mathematically speaking, potential topics of study for teacher education were infinite. 
    I could present data on speech and language disorders by exposing a strain of language-pathology that renders virtuous adults speechless.

    For teachers of the performing arts, one party could proffer sufficient acting talent to launch an entire theatre department. 

   A behavioral science focus might explore juvenile sub-group conflict and gang violence.  Plus, administrators would appreciate the numbers I could run on the probability of needing security.  (Any existing Campus Security could become fiscally-efficient by making several arrests.)

    For teachers of business courses, nowhere but an adolescent party is economics more perfectly modeled. There is one girl for every boy: perfect supply and demand. And there are substantial party profits yielded by host and parents alike. I even invented something called The Law Of Exploding Marginal Returns. This happens when the birthday teen receives more than $600 in cash and prizes without lifting a finger to plan her own party.

   Exploding Marginal Returns also occurs when parents reap consumer profits:  80 pounds of leftover food, none of which they ever purchased. Fourteen year olds uphold a mathematical construct called ‘Bring Your Own Food …. and soda, chairs, CDs, a DJ, acoustical equipment, extension cords, boosting amplifiers with strobing optical effects, a power generator, pyrotechnical apparati, slot machines, bonfire logs, rocket fuel and colorful conversations that make chaperones go away.’

   For that state-mandated Interdisciplinary-Focus, I believe 14-year olds have found a way to combine Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs with Emerson’s Transcendentalist Ideal, the Pentagon’s Model on Fiscal Inefficiency, and Corporate Total-Quality-Management. Here's how: Teenagers recognize man’s basic need for food and sex at parties, then they 'rise to the occasion,' spend all of their parents’ resources on party-excess that makes them sick, resulting in a totality of chaos that impacts everyone to an equal degree.

    But the greatest potential for research applies to STEM school educators, specifically biology teachers, particularly at a vocational technical school. A 9^th grade party is a walking clinical rotation. 
   Future nursing students can train in smoke inhalation, pyromania, first degree burns, menstrual cramps, electrocution, strobe light seizures, woofer-deafness, compulsive gambling, hysterical blindness and lacerations from airborne tacos.  ALL sustained by chaperones. (Although the boys at this party did require IV antibiotics when the girls gave them makeovers with cosmetics containing staph.)

   
   Fortunately, we have a huge family with several more 14-year olds whose birthdays are spaced throughout the academic year.  I already have a title-concept for one party in July: “Fudgicles and Hyperactivity in the Pre-Latency Child.”

   There is so much material here, I am thinking of proposing to an education professor that I do a thesis as independent study, in lieu of a Research Methods course.

   By the time I complete my thesis, I feel certain statistics will no longer exist. Or at least have relevance. ‘Math’ will be replaced by a computer app I’ll download to my Smartphone that will program itself to analyze the data I hire someone to extract from my paper.

   
   I am calling Nick now to let him know I’ve had a change of heart. Why, my master’s degree is only an irregular-heartbeat away --  so, power to the credential, man, right on. 

   Plus, I will sell my thesis to Abby for some semester in her distant future, when she must take research and statistics, quick, before she graduates. She’s a psych major.  (God knows, there’s more than enough material for psychology majors – here in this blog – for that.) 

I Caught My Bistro Chair On Fire With the Sun

Dear Nick, Jake, Zach, Abigail, Jonathan,

   Apparently, we had a house fire upstairs that I just discovered at noon today.  

   Remember how at Christmas, the bubbling runoff from my cranberry pie ignited the oven and tripped the upstairs smoke-detector and we couldn’t get it to shut off?  Well, we forgot to slide the battery-pack back inside the alarm.   

   I know what you are thinking: ‘We TOLD you not to make the woodstove a blast-furnace by leaving the door open then distracting yourself with Netflix and other acts of unemployment.” 

   But that is not what happened. The fire wasn’t anywhere near the woodstove.

   The fire took place up in our sunroom, where the sun shines, apparently even during the winter solstice, when the sun’s angle changes, so that during today’s early morning of utter cloudlessness, its rays penetrated the magnifying glass I had impaled as a decoration inside a planter on the bistro table.

   I always wondered if those stories were true. The ones about little boys who use magnifying glasses to burn ants.  I thought it was an urban legend.

   Well, seeing what the sun did to a hardwood bistro chair-back, I don’t want to think what it would do to ants.  I’m sure they just spark up – snap – not even a puff of smoke.  Although I bet if you lit up a whole colony, it’d be an impressive Fourth of July spectacle.

   Anyway, I was watering plants this morning when I noticed the maple bistro chair was sporting six diagonal scorched gashes.  Each gash represented an ignition site made by the sun as its rays shone through the planter’s magnifying glass.  As the sun moved on in the heavens, the flame would lose its heat-source and sputter out, leaving a gash, then a new flame would spark up at the next ignition-site a quarter of an inch away.

   I suspect this is how the Incas first learned to tell time:  they set a piece of quartz in a philodendron pot, or papyrus, and as the sun passed by, the magnified rays would ignite a  maple block serving as the face of a rudimentary clock, and the flames would mark the hours as they progressed across its surface.
   Using the Inca method, I’d say we had about four hours of sunlight blasting through my plant décor today.

   I rubbed at the black slashes on our chair-back and my hands smelled like the outdoor fire pit.  In fact, now that my nose is attuned to this smell, the entire sunroom smells like a fire pit.  Of course, that could just be a brain tumor. 

   Do you think our house insurance covers acts of flammable home decorating? I say yes.  Isn’t the sun an Act of God?  (Although a magnifying glass is an act of Science – but Mary Shelley would remind us that the best transcendental thinkers of Great Britain hotly debated the nature of God and Mankind, of Science and Nature.  And didn’t Nature and God always win?  Ergo, my fire was an Act of God.)

   I am calling our insurance company now.


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

   Okay, so I just got off the phone with the adjuster.  In a heavy Confederate accent, she said, “May-um.  You have GOT to be kiddin.  Have you never heard of using a magnifyin’ glass to burn ants?” 

   I told her that was an urban legend invented by Spielberg, so she told me SHE used to burn ants with a magnifying glass.

   I explained I had a sociology degree and that two of my children were psychology majors, and that as far as I could tell, this was classic behavior of a psychopath.  “Burning ants is gateway-arson.  It's the stuff that hooks Serial Killers.”

   This is when she explained, “Sweetie, I’m sorry but we don’t cover acts of just plain dumb.”


   “Besides,” she added, “you have a HUGE deductible.  Your chair is not worth $5,000.  Why don’t you put the other chairs in the same spot so the sun can distress ‘em all equally?  From the photo you emailed me, I think a whole set’d look lovely.”

   So before I do this, I would like your opinion.  Please review my chair-back scorches, below, and tell me if I should do the same to the other chairs.

Sun-Enhanced Chair

Love, 
 Mom  (aka 'Icarus') 

Jonathan:  Exciting fire news.  Can’t wait to see the carnage in person. (Did you slide the batteries back in the case yet?) Off to a meeting --

  

Jacob: After I got over the initial relief that something worse didn’t happen, I am laughing, picturing the tiny bright dot of super sun slowly tracking along the room. (Please slide NEW batteries into the alarm-case.) I have a teleconference --

Me:  Hey – you guys all have gmail. Are you noticing the gmail robots are analyzing our emails then sending what it thinks is appropriate advertising? It is now sending me ads for a FIRE SALE, a Glass Sunroom, a Gas Fire Pit, plus life insurance. (Also I can get Two-For-One on a battery-operated “toy” they’ll mail postage-paid in a discreet brown wrapper.)

Nick:  And that’s lunch.   *unsubscribe*

Me:  Wait, Nick, no one answered my question about scorching the other chairs.  :( I am getting a new family and asking their opinion--

Abby:  Mom, the refund expired on this family, so you’re stuck with us, along with your single scorched chair.  Do NOT scorch any more.  Please put the magnifying glass away, inside the buffet drawer, away from any light source, and go out and buy fresh batteries at a store so you know they are new.  Do this now.  I’m off to class --

Me:  Hey, Zach, I didn’t hear from you. What do YOU think?

Zach:  On the road, Ma.  Buy’g batts 4 U on lunch-hr. Will drop by Dad’s office, along w/Walmart, Pier 1, Target Employ’t Apps 2 keep U safe.  ;(  Z

[You know, Moms aren’t supposed to have favorites…  but I have to say, Zachary is always lookin out for his.  ;)  XOXO & <3 2 Z]

Make Your Yard An Eco-Friendly Nature Preserve

Last evening’s unprecedented WE CANNOT PREDICT WHAT IT WILL DO winter storm did precisely what meteorologists predicted:  it dumped two inches of snow on my town.  This makes the meteorologists’ predictions 100 per cent incorrect, consistently, for the past three years. 

Originally, meteorologists said that their favorite computer model had forecast two inches of snow inside the Blackstone Valley Corridor, where I live. Then they reneged, noting they could not possibly predict what this crazy rainstorm-blizzard might do:  thunder-snow could turn to sunshine, causing potential droughts on the Cape and the Islands. There could be locusts, leprosy, Mayan Apocalypse Part II.

But the storm dumped precisely two of the originally-predicted inches of pure powder on my town. 

For my husband, this brought fanciful thoughts of shussing his way from the summit of Mt. Wachusett to my driveway, where he would segue from skiing to snow-blowing with imperceptible grace.

For me, my stomach growled.

When I woke up, I thought it was still snowing, but it was the wind blowing quarter-sized snow-puffs around our house.  As I examined the swirling flakes, I got hungry for the Pillsbury Dough Boy (his fool-proof crescent rolls always come out light and flaky.)

By the way, have you ever considered the etymology of the phrase ‘fool-proof’?  Does it really mean that even a fool can’t mess it up?  I only realized this today when I reflected on the Pillsbury Dough Boy, but that is not what today’s post is about. 

It is about deer.

This is a deer.  (Not the one in my yard.) 

Earlier this morning, all that puff circulated about like winged flake-fairies, then lighted on various landscape architecture out back (a heap of damp kindling and a broken backboard with rusting hoop).  It looked like some Bermuda Triangle Snow-Nexus had arranged itself into twisted snow towers at either side of the entrance to our woods.  

It was a bit entrancing in a scary way.  This opening marks the start of a trail that takes our wheelbarrow on a long journey to cords of wood stacked deep within the primeval darkness, nestled under a leafless canopy.  But now, it was offset either by snow-blanketed topiary from a British cottage garden, or two lions guarding a death-labyrinth from Stephen King’s The Shining.

  

Those entrance-mounds sort of reminded me of the snow-covered lawn jockeys that used to adorn the walkway of my family’s General Practitioner in winter.  This is why I no longer get flu shots.  Or maybe even a pair of fertility gargoyles that, in Medieval times, would guard our home from evil or virtue, I forget which. 

But as quickly as those entrance-guardians were formed, they vanished from a wind gust, revealing … kindling piled up, adjacent to a torqued backboard with hoop. 

The moment was gone.

But Nature Taketh and She Giveth Right Back because there, near those newly-naked artifacts, stood two deer.

Big deer.  Neither had a rack so I assumed they were either a lesbian couple or heterosexual, but the male suffered from ‘low-T’ or un-descended testicles preventing his horns from sprouting.

I was paralyzed with all this nature erupting in my backyard.  They were gorgeous. 

I looked around quickly to see if I couldn’t find batteries to load into the digital camera – (no) – then I scanned about for my cell phone (still in my car).

So I just stood there, mesmerized.

That’s when I noticed they had consumed the bottom-third of two evergreen trees we had planted years ago.  They were two of a total of twelve, designed to keep the soil from turning to spring mudslides that cascade into our neighbor’s pool.  The first time this happened, it was like living next door to the movie Poltergeist, only no caskets or skeletons bubbled up. 

These little landslides began the year we’d excavated to install a pool of our own, and the vast Mayan Burial Mound the installers created to ‘level off’ the backyard caused mayhem to race downhill into our neighbor’s yard.  We didn't think they were happy.  So we planted twelve trees to hold the soil.

Anyway, I found myself caught in a conundrum.  Was this not a rare gift?  A Nature Moment to relish?  Especially given that I had opted out of some cheap ‘Photo Op’ to enhance this blog.

Yet, were these two Acts Of Nature not foraging away our Goodwill Toward Neighbor, devouring landscaping for which we had paid more than $70 per tree?

They ate the bottom-third off of three more trees before I decided that their ‘special sculpting’ was quite enough, thank you, so I opened the slider and tossed them half a loaf of pumpernickel bread.

And like that – they bolted past the broken backboard and the damp kindling into the wilderness (and Route 16… to infinity and beyond).

Christmas Spike, 2013, after A Great Lopping

I realized I should have strewn my Ex-Christmas tree’s branches out there – as a deer offering -- to protect our landscaping investment, but how was I to know last year was a bad year for acorns, causing anorexic lesbian deer to eat my Landslide-Stoppers? 

Well, from now on I plan to keep a supply of pumpernickel bread on hand.  It is excellent deer repellant.

If that doesn’t work, I will take the Christmas Spike I created by lopping off all the edible branches that have now been composted, and place it across the entrance to the woods.  As a warning to deer everywhere.  “THIS is what all of our landscaping is like, so don’t bother foraging for succulent evergreen branches.  Go next door. The neighbors’ arborvitae is especially lush this winter.”

Not my neighbor's arborvitae (which means 'vital arbor' in another language)

Mmmm.  Arborvitae.  My goodness, nature is appetizing today.  Crescent rolls.  Salad.  Venison. 

I really have to post this, quick, and go make some lunch.  It’s nearly 1:30 already.