Monthly Archives: March 2013

Today is cloudy, gray, cold and just plain bleccchhh.  We’re waiting for Winter Storm Virgil to come be a pain in the petootie.  And as this is the beginning of our Spring Break, Critter and Varmint are less than pleased about it.

I confess I, too, have been a little glum.  It’s hard to be an optimist in the face of all this grumpy, stormy, moroseness.

But just a moment ago, I came across this picture:

And the sun came out.

Not literally, of course, but it did make me grin and chuckle.

Isn’t it crazy how a silly moment at the beach can brighten a day months into the future?

Makes you wonder what today’s moments might do months from now.  I have a suspicion that it works both ways….happy moments can bring future happiness, and dark moments can bring future darkness.

I’d better get my happy game on!

Today My Captain opened our shiny, brand-spankin’ new, extra-wide Mama Boe-sized mailbox to find someone had mailed us a curiously shaped package.

After the police dogs finished sniffing it for anything dangerous, we cautiously lifted it out to find:

The weirdest ding-dang package we’ve ever received.  A see-through bucket with Easter wishes and colored Easter grass inside, and something else we couldn’t quite make out.  The return address proved it was from our friends Paul and Heather (from Social Climbing fame).  THIS was bound to be interesting!

We took it inside, had to scour the basement for a paint-bucket opener, pried the top off, and pulled this out:

Followed closely by this:

A Moose Cozy.  For when I need to insulate my beverage of choice with a large North American Mammal.

A large North American Mammal with a cute hiney:

I have the weirdest friends.

Thank God.

I want you all to know that I went ahead and took down the Christmas lights from the tall Spruce in front of the Little Cottage today.  I mean, I was GOING to, I had INTENDED to, I really WANTED to do it tomorrow on St. Patrick’s Day, but you know me, I’m an overachiever.

As I stretched this way and that, using the hooked pole, unwinding and lifting and lowering strand after strand of lights, I thought back to our beautiful Christmas holiday this year.  The kids had so much fun; WE had so much fun giving them so much fun; Grandma Jane and Mike had so much fun watching us have fun giving the kids so much fun…..

It was a wonderful season, filled with love and laughter and peace.

I thought about all of that as each *^%%^@! strand of light got tangled into other @#!#$$ strands of lights, and it was REALLY starting to  piss me off.  Several strands actually snapped in my impatience; my arms were burning so badly that I just yanked the dagnab thing, sometimes snapping the branch off in the process.

I began muttering.  That soon ratched up to cursing, until I called over to My Captain, who was in the yard cleaning up sticks and leaves.

“If you don’t help me with this thing right now, I’m going to snap this damn pole in two, SO HELP ME!” I hollered for all the neighbors to hear.

My Captain hollered back for me to just throw the pole down and go inside before I ruptured an artery or something.

I hurled the damn pole down with a ferocity that only a 220lb woman can hurl, and stomped back into the house, swearing I’ll never put those goddamn lights back up so help me…..

….er,….God.

And then I remembered Christmas peace and joy and fun, and everything I’d been so content with just a half an hour ago.

And thumped down on a kitchen chair, and felt about 2 years old.

The good news? I beat St. Patrick’s Day for getting the lights down this year.  The bad news?  Only half of the light strands are still in one piece.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, friends!  May your day be filled with…uh….PEACE!

Mama B.

My father drilled into my head at the tender age of 16 that I should never, ever, ever, ever let my car’s fuel gauge fall below 1/4 of a tank.

This would have left more of an impression on me if my ’71 VW Bug had had a working fuel gauge at the time.

But make no mistake, that car was wonderful.  If I made a right turn too fast, the passenger door would fly open and the horn would honk.  I kid you not.  If I had the windshield wipers on at the same time I had the radio playing, the music would stop every time the blades hit the top of their arc.  I KID YOU NOT.  There was an enormous crater of a dent in the front of the car from when the previous owner had, er, miscalculated.  This, of course, led us to name the junker “Dimples.”

I never ran out of gas with Dimples because I was so full of anxiety about it that I would stop and top it off every chance I got. (Back when gasoline was less than $1.00 a gallon!)

My subsequent cars had working fuel gauges, thankfully.   Life was good.  I never ran out of gas.  Of all the automobile-related calamities that befell me during my youth, never once did I have to make the call, “Um, Mom, can you bring me some gas?”

So last week, after I had loaned my car to a friend and forgotten that he warned me that he had not had a chance to refill my gas tank, I found myself driving a lonely country road in this situation:

ACK!  HOLY CRAP!!!!!

I did the first thing that any woman on the brink of panic would do in such a situation, and immediately whipped out my cell phone to record this calamity for future comedic use on my blog.  I believe that I read maneuver in a driving manual once.

You’ll note that my speedometer reads 25 MPH, despite my absolutely empty tank.  How can this be, you ask?

Simple!  I was coasting down a rather lengthy hill.

And there, at the bottom of the hill on this lonely country road, was a Mom-and-Pop Gas station that, filthy and run down as it was, seemed like Nirvana to me.

I coasted down into the station in a blaze of triumphant glory, and began pumping that liquid gold into the tank as happily as a little girl while laughing and dancing a 220 lb jig.

Which freaked Mom-and-Pop out.

The lesson here?

Always start your novice drivers out in dangerously broken down beaters.  It will give them the survival tools they’ll need later on in life.

At least, that’s all I came away with.