Hobson's Choice
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Crazy Jenny in Two Easy Steps
Would you like to know what button to push, what to do to turn me into a yelling idiot, how to make me go from zero to nuts in 10 seconds? It's very easy. Demand that I do something impossible while I'm driving you around in a car. While I'm ferrying you about and keeping you safe from imminent and horrible harm, demand that I help you change clothes. Or you could ask me to reach a toy in the far reaches of the backseat. Perhaps you would want me to locate a new pair of socks for you. Then you could cry because I can't do any of those things while driving. And you would pay no attention to my explanation about how I'm driving carefully to keep you safe.
You would be pretty much guaranteed to see me lose it on I-64. And that's what Eleanor did today.
What I'm Reading: Gardens of the Dead by William Brodrick. I don't think it's going to be as good as his first book, The Sixth Lamentation, but SL was the best book I read in 2005
What I'm Knitting: Cast on a different pair of socks in a thicker yarn for Chris -- I realized that I really couldn't do 80 stitches a round and hope to persevere through two socks. Cast on an adult female pair of socks. Maybe for me.
5:55 p.m. - 2006-10-17
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Mouser
Yesterday, the trap caught a mouse. We came home from school, Eleanor requested lunch, I turned to the stove, and there it was. Also, some brains. I like to think it says something good about me that I found it difficult to eat after being responsible for another creature's death and that I ate lunch anyway
5:54 p.m. - 2006-10-17
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Developments
The Reese's peanut butter is gone, but the trap has not been sprung. Grrrrr.
6:48 p.m. - 2006-10-15
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Because I know you were up all night wondering...
No, it didn't work. The traps are still mouse-free
10:48 a.m. - 2006-10-15
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Mice (Again)
I remember reading, as a young adult, that you knew you were grown up when you found yourself having lots of conversations about real estate. I wondered what that would be like.
I have to add that adulthood also means have lots of conversations about mice and their eradication. With our constant and losing struggle against the incredibly brilliant Ralph S. Mouse, I find that I can work mice into almost any conversation in my quest to find a magic bullet against Ralph (short of actual bullets, that is). I spent a good portion of the evening yesterday trading mouse stories with a bunch of mom friends. It turns out there are as many ways to kill a mouse as there are to skin the proverbial cat.
One of my friends has a husband who killed a mouse with a knife. Another friend said that it must have been an elderly mouse that he could catch it with his bare hands. And another shared anecdotal evidence from her relatives that the glue trap does not have to mean a protracted, grim death if you drop a heavy weight on the mouse after it's caught in the trap. I don't know if that mitigates the cruelty or not.
And I got more advice on trap bait, this from my friend Hannah. Reese's Peanut Cups, she says. I personally think that the candy bar industry and the mouse trap industry may engage in some kickbacks. I keep getting these candy bar recommendations, and none of them work on Ralph S. Mouse. Nonetheless, there's some Reese's on the baited traps tonight.
At Target today, the shelf stocker suggested getting a cat. When I told him I had two who were too old to catch mice, we got into a delightful conversation about mousers. He said that his old cat was so enamored of the baby boy in the household that he would bring rabbit haunches to the baby as a gift. And I reminisced about some high school catsitting experiences that involved picking up what I thought was a stray leaf in the hall, but was in fact a mouse tail. The rest of it was gone. I wasn't around for Jazz and Ares' glory days when they expressed their adoration for Chris with dead rodents and small mammals. To give the old boys their due, I'm sure they felled rabbits, moles, yea groundhogs and small yippy dogs in their heyday.
Those days are over, so we must hope tonight to hear the snap of the trap and that our mouse was honored for his last experience in life to be the combination of peanut butter and chocolate.
9:27 p.m. - 2006-10-14
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Blech!
There are certain times of the month when there are no words to express your feelings upon discovering that a dog has been rooting through your garbage in the night.
9:26 p.m. - 2006-10-14
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Sing
Note to other women at the Y: Your husband did not give you and ipod for your birthday so that you could loudly sing "You're as cold as ice" while you're riding the stationery bike.
4:17 p.m. - 2006-10-13
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Bones
E: What's a skeleton?
J: All the bones inside your body.
E: I don't have one.
J: Yes, you have one. Everyone has one. It holds our bodies up and keeps them from being wobbly.
E: I can't see it. So I don't have one.
J: Well, hmm.... there are lots of things we can't see that we know are there. Like .... like... electrons.
E: I don't have one.
J: Like Grandma Sheila. I can't see her right now, but I know she's alive and kicking in Indiana.
E: Yes, she is. But she doesn't have a skeleton.
8:00 p.m. - 2006-10-10
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Big Cats
How much do big cats sleep? It's a question lately raised in our house, and we're not talking about Jazz's recent weight gain. If our cats seem to spend most of the day sleeping, then what about tigers and lions? We picture them pouncing, chasing, and biting. But do they, like our home-grown varieties, spend much of the day dozing.
And the answer according to the Sleep Syllabus, is "yes." The lion sleeps slightly longer than the domestic housecat, 13.5 versus 12.5. (Most fascinatingly, the asiatic elephant only sleeps 3.1 hours in the 24 hour cycle -- what do they think about and sing about in all that time?)
Despite checking into the Sleep Syllabus for accuracy and general Internet Goodness, I must report that Jazz and Ares sleep much longer than 12.5 hours a day. In their old age, they seem to be awake for only a few hours of the day or night. Much of that time is spent grooming each other and eating. I call them "our old men." There is some mystery in making a home with creatures who are nearing their life span, live with decline. Besides their constant dozing, they are neither of them able to catch mice any more. In their young and wild cathood, they used to express their adoration of Chris by bringing him dead animals sometimes as big as a rabbit. It's been several years now since they've been interested in the rowdier cat toys, and the catnip high they used to love now only makes them edgy. Their enjoyments of -- how shall I put this -- conjugal love becomes rarer. But yet they seem to enjoy sleeping away the day; they seem to soak up the sun's rays more efficiently than before. Lolling on the front steps, Jazz looks smugger than ever on an unexpectedly hot autumn day. Of course, they continue their quest to sleep on my head at night (I continue to hurl them off whenever I awake: last night, I spent a long time wondering about the hair in my ear until I figured out it was Ares' fur).
We got to talking about old lions and tigers and how they pass their day, and we concluded that probably there aren't too many old big cats, at least not males who've been chased off by the younger generation. I myself a'm grateful for the elderly domestic housecat and the lessons they are teaching me. They are not the cats I married into, and they're not exactly growing old with style. But there is grace in slowing down, in putting away youthful roughness, and enjoying sunlight and sleep until one day they just stay sleeping.
(Assuming of course that the six million dollar cat -- Jazz-- doesn't go out on one of his bizarre ailments. Like the time his face blew up to the size of a basketball. Like the fight wounds he successfully hid for weeks until their pus exploded. Like the time he lost his leg. Like the time he stopped peeing....)
9:27 p.m. - 2006-10-09
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Reading Materials
Let's say that in November of last year, you notice that you are reading "Dora's Halloween Adventure" around 50 times a day. So it being Thanksgiving and Halloween almost a month in the past, you try to hide it. It is found. Give it another month or two of daily readings. You think that there's got to be a place in this giant house where I can successfully hide a book from a preschooler. And there is.
So here's the problem: if a hiding place is so good that a preschooler never even guesses at it, there's a pretty good chance that it's good enough to fool you, too. So now, when it would be appropriate to read "Dora's Halloween Adventure," you can remember where the hiding place was.
4:46 p.m. - 2006-11-08
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It's official
We are at home in Huntington. I took Eleanor down to the park tonight to see all the girls getting their Homecoming pictures taken at the park. Astonishingly, for the first time in a long time, we didn't see anyone we knew at the park (although I did call down a little kid who was getting ready to run into the street). We admired the dresses and asked a lot of questions about how you would keep your fancy dress clean at the park (Answer: you probably don't play at the playground). Then we came home, and I called our neighbor Heather. And we talked about all the neighborhood kids heading off to the prom and about our neighbor Mariela who's a senior and going to last homecoming. Tonight, while knitting, I'll try not to worry about the kids all out late tonight, probably doing stupid things.
6:59 p.m. - 2006-11-07
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Counting
This is how my thinking goes nowadays. I'm eight days post-ovulation, and I'm hoping that I can make it to ten or 11 because then I won't have to take clomid. It no longer occurs to me to hope for pregnancy. I just hope to avoid clomid.
6:56 p.m. - 2006-11-07
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Fit Linxx
So the "Y" has this computerized system that lets you keep track of your workouts, and then they send you a little email every month summarizing your results.
Do I think this is a great program? Not really. Would I have invested in it if I were the "Y"? No. However, is Jenny Hobson The Frugal known to turn down freebies? Almost never.
All this is just to say that I lifted the equivalent of 4 African elephants in the month of September.
3:21 p.m. - 2006-10-06
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Jenny endorses
Borax and cola.
Not together, mind you. I think that might be a fairly explosive combination.
But yet, borax and cola for cleaning the toilet. I've been trying, gradually, to replace our cleaning products with more environmentally friendly ones. And I've found inexpensive solutions for the most part, but the toilet was stumping me. Toilet cleaner is just really corrosive and nasty and bad for the groundwater. The Method line at Target has not discovered a toilet bowl cleaner that they can endorse.
I found the tips for borax and cola in women's magazines. The borax actually cleans the toilet bowl. And the coke gets rid of the stains. You might not need the cola if you live in a new house or have a younger toilet than ours (83 years old). So once a week, I borax it. And then a few days later, I coke it (well, generic Aldi cola -- I'm not pay for the real thing FOR THE TOILET).
On other product endorsement notes, I am saddened to say that I cannot recommend Method window cleaner. It just streaks like crazy. At first, being me, I thought that I had simply never noticed before what a rotten window cleaner I am (I mean, other than the fact that I don't remove my storms to clean them, and I have grandiose fantasies about hiring a Marshall student to do this one summer). Then I decided that perhaps at age 33, I had lost the skill to clean a window. Finally, having exhausted even more ideas, I realized that it was the cleaner and not me at all. I mean, the streaks are really bad: your window looks worse clean than it does dirty.
So it's back to vinegar for me.
1:55 p.m. - 2006-10-05
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Come ye rains and snows of winter!
The roof is no longer leaking! The leak which we first spotted in May is now, hallelujah!, fixed. After 4 trips by Mr. Nash, three attempted solutions, and two failures. Only 6 months later, our roof is, if only momentarily, leak-free. It took Mr. Nash coming over on a rainy day and watching the leak so that he could figure out what was going on.
Mr. Nash informs us that our current roof will last another four or five years. So friends and neighbors, you'd better just resign yourself to the carpet in the kitchen. It doesn't look like the home improvement budget is going to have room for tiles or linoleum any time soon.
1:52 p.m. - 2006-10-05
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