Pony Express Posts: Belated Announcement

Well, I suppose there's no point continuing to wait for a substantial, creative manner of announcement to float down from the heavens on a golden harp-shaped hovercraft, now that it's been a couple months.

My procrastination has been holding up a backlog of what's been passing for content here the past couple years (since we bought the house), as a lot of what I've thought of saying the past 6 months or so was in some way tied to this news... news which I had been trying not to just throw out there unceremoniously, much in the way I'm about to do right now:

We had yet another baby last month.  

See? That's her right up there, as proof. The second coming of M-, hereby to be known as A-. So we've completed our set of two boys and two girls.*

Yes, that's right, according to most people's reactions, as well as a quick flip through a generation's worth of census data, we are now the modern equivalent of that 8-kid family** people used to marvel at during the Baby Boom and Generation X's heyday.

Do we feel more complete now, you wonder? Have we started getting a human amount of sleep yet? Have we worked out some kind of daily routine now that school has started for J- and the kids? Have we any hope of shaking off the influence of our hypnotizing alien captors soon? Take a glance at the posting history here and then pencil in your guesses before I stop by with the answer key as soon as I can.

In the meantime, with this official notice out here, I should be able to at least get back to posting more lists of tidbits and such a few times a month, with more promises of actual paragraphs and thoughts and time and craft someday, once again.

It's the thought that counts, right?

---

* This means I'll have to update the banner again, so soon*** after the last time.

** All I can say is those people are lucky they were able to delude themselves into thinking that small children wedged tightly enough across the bench seat of a station wagon would provide their own restraint in case of a high-speed accident. Otherwise, the country would either be a fraction of its present size today, or it would have been swarmed throughout the '60s with extended vans, RVs, and "Parental Sanity trailers" featuring a half-dozen kids suspended along the walls with heavy-duty straps.

*** Obviously a relative term, given that some of the pictures were several years out of date when I replaced them a couple months ago...

Super fun vacation time for old ladies

Well, after a few years of working from home while watching the kids (easier with all-day school, for sure!), and thus splitting responsibilities a lot more with my wife J- than I had been, I'm now ankle-deep in a taste of juggling everything by myself again for a week and a half: J- is taking a vacation with my sister and her friend to hang around a beach house and reflect on turning 30 and 25, respectively.

I shouldn't complain, since I took a similar trip with my brother last year* when I turned 30, but who would I be if I didn't? I mean, you may not realize it, given my laughably outdated banner up there, but I'm dealing with an 8-year-old, a 5-year-old, a 19-month-old, a basement full of fleas, and a garage full of 9 cats**, whereas J- only had to deal with a 7-year-old, a 4-year-old, a 7-month-old, a kitchen being drywalled, and a very welcome mother cat and three kittens*** who'd recently shown up on our doorstep out here in Cat Country.

So, clearly, the difference is night and day.

J- dealt with the stress last year by buying them off with a promise to have candy for dinner, and then following through in legendary form.

Problem for me is, not only do they now have their bars set somewhere just above, "There is such a thing as candy for dinner", but they've already spent most of this summer being spoiled by one set of grandparents or another, to the point that the older two wouldn't bat an eyelash at being handed the keys to their own set of his-and-hers hovercrafts.

So what am I supposed to do?

All I've come up with so far is to go totally the other way and just put them to work as much as possible, to make them really appreciate heading back to school soon, as a break in their strict schedule of Cleaning Up After Myself, plus Other Light Chores****. It seems to be working pretty well, knock on wood... for me, at least.

I think they'll be happy to see Momma walk through the door.

---

* Of course I didn't take the opportunity to get back into writing real blog posts at the time, because that would make too much sense.

** Now that we found a home for one of the 8 kittens born in two litters within two days back in May...

*** The surviving kitten of which just had her first litter (of 5) in our garage at almost exactly 1 year old.

**** The latter of which generally gets bumped off the schedule, due to the first show running long...

Potential book titles, Vol. 3

Here are a few more titles of fiction and nonfiction books I might write, if I ever manage to finish something* that takes more than 10 minutes at a time:

Leftover Birthday Cake: Why Parents Have Been Having Children Since Ancient Times

Why Would I Even Have To Forewarn You To Not Put That In Your Mouth??

Enter Title Here: Sometimes I Put Things Off A Bit Too Long

Put That Down: When I Said I Wouldn't Tell You Again, I Meant After This Time

I'm Starting To Understand Why People Demolish And Rebuild, Waste Be Damned: A Home Remodeling Story

---

* Such as writing a decent blog post of substance.

Classic quotes, Vol. 30

Here's a selection of some recent quotes from my 4-year-old daughter M- and 7-year-old son D-:

D- (after milking a legitimate cough a bit much): I AM sick-- I've always had a cough like this. ... YES, always... well, since last evening.

M- (rooting around behind her in her car seat as we drove): I've got a BUNCH of toys and stuff in my seat crack! I've got crayons, and Cheerios...a penny. I've got a PENNY in my SEAT CRACK!

D- (running, eagerly, after it was pointed out that Momma's crude humor was technically appropriate given her location*): Then I'm gonna go to the bathroom to say a bunch more BUTT things!

M- (finding a new way to protest, a few days after an explanation of Intellectual Property law): No, D-!! That's MY trademarrrrrrrrrk!

D- (unaware of the sad, overwhelming facts about himself these days, after reflecting on all the "bad kids" in his yearbook): Wow, MY teacher is lucky! Every OTHER teacher has a BAD kid in her class who has to go to the OFFICE like every day!

---

* For the record, no, she was in the bathroom washing dishes**, NOT using the toilet.***

** Until our kitchen is reassembled (but it's only been 8 months!!), that's where we're forced to wash them. We couldn't be happier about this...

*** She NEVER does that.

Jesus was a carpenter, right?

Something about living out here all on our own, with all the breathing room we can stand and an entire second garage just for tools and such, my carpentry fever has flared up worse than ever. I'm slowly acquiring all the tools of a world-class woodworking shop.

My new motto, whenever my wife mentions wanting to buy something, is, "I could make one for you out of wood."

A chair? A table? A staircase? A dresser? A patio? An ottoman? A kitten? A stepstool? A pillow? Why not?

And yet, even I know my limits.

But perhaps it doesn't seem that way to other people, based on the following conversation about our upcoming kitchen remodel that I had recently with my friend Adam, who gave me the nickname LiteralDan years ago.

Adam: You're gonna buy cabinets?? You know they're crazy expensive, right?

Me: Yeah, I know...

Adam: You, of all people, I'd expect to make your own cabinets. You could totally do it, too.

Me: Well... I've been tempted, but it'd take me forever, to do it right. ...I wanna learn and practice in a lower-profile area.

Adam (uncharacteristically animated, earnest, and encouraging): C'mon, you could do it! You're just enough of a perfectionist that they'd be done right, even if they took a long time, and you'd have them forever. You could always point to them and say, "I made that."

Me (finally catching on): ... You're just trying to talk me into the disaster of making my own kitchen cabinets for your own entertainment, aren't you?

Adam (proudly): Yes, yes I am.

What I've learned moving from city to country

It's been six months now since we moved out to the middle of these Illinois cornfields from the near-northwest Chicago suburbs (where I spent most of my life), so I figure now's a good time to look back on what we've learned.

1. People consider the "neighborhood" an amorphous area of about 5 square miles around you, and everyone within that space and even beyond will know everything about you that anyone can find out.

2. All of those people will do anything they can to make your time on this Earth more bearable, at any time of day or night.

3. When Jehovah's Witnesses don't manage to catch you at home, they will hand write a personalized letter to enclose with the pamphlet they mail you instead.

4. Feed corn is nowhere near as delicious as sweet corn, but feed corn is all anyone wants to grow.

5. If Nature loves you, then a scraggly-looking stand of bush-like trees surrounded by tall weeds can turn out to actually be a few mulberry trees grown together... and mulberry pie is easy to make and extremely delicious*... and because of this, the weed-free stand of noble arbors will begin to look more and more beautiful to you every day.

6. I must get some livestock. I just HAVE to! Conveniently, I also find myself really wanting to.

7. The slow pace of life and constant contact with the cycles of Nature can turn you into an 80-year-old surprisingly quickly. Suspenders seem practical, TV seems unnecessary and loud, everything is more satisfying when done yourself, and a bout of shingles is apparently par for the course.**

8. Children can entertain themselves for a surprisingly long time right in your yard. Just with sticks 'n' stuff.***

9. The ability to do whatever you feel like without everybody looking over your shoulder is intoxicating, and I find myself daydreaming about where would be best to launch my fireworks and set up my shooting range (factoring in my future prairie, forest, giant firepit, pond, 9-hole golf course, and gardens).

10. Wearing a shirt feels like suiting up in a tuxedo or a parka, depending on the weather and the fabric. It's definitely one of the worst parts about going in to town.

---

* The only troublesome part is removing the little stems from each fingernail-staining berry, though some say you don't really need to.

** I'm pretty sure they'll repossess your house, or at least your land, if you don't develop it within 6 months. I made it just under the wire!

*** Only provided they have no apparent supervision.

Things that amuse me, Vol. 2

Here, in lieu of something more cohesive, are a few of the things that have been amusing me lately:

1. Already a budding patriot at 2, the other day my daughter M- called out, "Look at my sandal!" only to reveal that, for no apparent reason, she'd ripped the flag off one of those 4th of July souvenirs and tied it around her little foot with a piece of string.

2. One recent message in the waves of spam e-mails I get daily stood out from the cesspool of similarly themed junk. It was called, "Your pork pistol won't fail" ...Great, thanks for ruining pork chops for me, for all time. Even schnitzel can't hide such a visual.

3. When perusing Endless.com to see if I could save money by ordering my next pair of sneakers online instead of having to (shudder) go to a store,* I feel like I was victimized by discriminatory software. After putting in the general specs of what I was looking for, the top row of search results were all women's pink ballet slippers. I say, stay out of this, Internet! That diaper bag is just damn handy, okay. That's the limit of my gender bending, I swear.**

4. After only a couple days of having wireless Internet here in the new house, I could already tell I'm going to need to put some kind of wheeled computer desk in the bathroom.

---

* No such luck, the universe hates me. I should have realized this by the fact that even New Balance has forsaken me and the sanctity/dryness of the side of my right foot, where the sole of my shoe very subtly detached a mere two months after I started wearing my latest shoes.

** But then, the Internet has never steered me wrong before...

There will be water.

Every day I live out here in the country in our new house, I expand my perspective on the world in new and unexpected ways. For example, I now know there are several very different ways you can think of your basement.

One way, with a properly finished basement, is as an extra living space, with all the amenities of the above-ground floors.

Another way, with a standard basement, is as a place to store things you want out of the way, or a place to house your tool collection where everybody else won't get their grubby hands all over it.

A third way, with my basement, is as a handy container to hold massive amounts of water, one that should be measured cubically for volume rather than by square footage when assessing its value as part of the house.

I'll spare you the details of my theories on hows and whys, but I'll just say that until you've seen streams of bubbles emerging from cracks in your floor, as the already pretty sodden Earth readily drinks up the surprising source of refreshment that is your basement, you can't truly appreciate the ability to nurture that space as a precious aquatic environment on an otherwise inhospitable frozen prairie.

Also, a situation like this allows you to learn the gallon capacity of your super-sweet new snow snovel. (Plus, what else would fully clean off all the clay from shoveling out the leftover pile of dirt from the previous owner's hasty sump-pump installation?)

Like so many things in life, this (hopefully temporary) stressful and somewhat frustrating situation has a bright side-- I've learned so much about sump pump specifications, the intricacies of water softening and iron removal systems, and the effects of a loosely filled old well pit having recently unfrozen sump discharge lines emptying right on top of it.

And of course, living out here in what's effectively the nicest cabin ever built, nature's always here to teach me something, too. Like that high winds carrying loose snow always seek the best-shoveled path. And that quaint as all the bunny tracks around the constantly replenished source of fresh, salty water may be, eventually that thing making the larger prints every morning will manage to find itself something to eat one day when it comes for its own warm drink.

And that meal will be sure to evacuate its every orifice before shuffling off this mortal coil, all across the view from your breakfast table.

Just breathe deep of that fresh country air, my friends. Ahhhh...

Reports of my death are only mildly exaggerated

Editor's Note: Please humor me by imagining this post being grunted over my shoulder as I slaughter mice by the thousands, sword and shield in hand.

Editor's Note: And a gun... a really big, cool gun.

Now that I've gotten my Internet service up and running, I felt honor-bound to offer you all some kind of post as a reward for waiting patiently this whole week. By the computer, quietly whimpering all along, no doubt.

As a bonus for me, your standards are probably set really low by now, much like a food critic on the brink of starvation. I've always excelled at soaring over low standards as easily as I take the high-standard bar right in the teeth.

But speaking of teeth, as I listen to our new house settle and make all those noises houses do, I recline with bated breath, like the world's laziest hunter, waiting to see if we can all (theoretically) feast on roast mouseflesh tomorrow at breakfast. Otherwise, it's back to good old ladybugs and houseflies. By the handful.

The story of my short time in this (wonderful, amazing, joyous, I swear) house has been undeniably written in blood, though thankfully not much of it has been human.

If I were to make a size-relative hash mark for every life I've taken in the past six days, I could have re-created Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte twice, or, more likely, covered several walls with thousands of tiny scratches forming no discernible pattern. Either way, I'm pretty sure I'd be in trouble once my wife saw it.

But what my wife would like less would be the sight of me getting ready for breakfast by dabbing at blood stains on the old carpet someone saw fit to put in the kitchen while yelling at our 2-year-old that I meant it when I said to stay upstairs for just one more lousy minute.*

For you see, since my wife already had quite a long commute from our old apartment, and our "new" 120-year-old house is 2 hours farther away, she'll continue staying at my parents' house most of the time during the week, probably through the rest of the school year.

Our 5-year-old son D- is there with her as he continues at his old kindergarten until Christmas break, and thankfully after getting to play in his new bedroom for awhile on move-in day, he's eager for the school transition instead of dreading it.

And he's making the most of the opportunity to start over fresh, it seems, by not only torching every bridge a 5-year-old could possibly have built, but first desecrating them and then laughing while they burn.

So you can see why I've been even scarcer than recent months around here. I do appreciate the Amazon click-throughs some of you seem to have made after my previous post, and also the comments on my handful of recent status updates on Facebook. It's nice to not be totally abandoned even when I've abandoned everyone else for the time being!

I'll try to cobble together some list posts and other fragments that don't require as much consecutive minutes of focus, to get back in the swing of posting on here.

In the meantime, keep an eye on my Facebook status to make sure I haven't joined the fried mouse corpses in a fuse box somewhere in our dank old basement. ...Which I love, somewhere deep down. Deeper than the source of water that bubbles up through the floor now and then.

---

* In case you somehow missed her repeated announcements to the world at large, she will SAVE the mice. All the mice!**

** That was before I explained to her in greater detail this evening about the bathroom habits, or lack thereof, of housebound rodents. Now she "hates all the mice", and presumably thirsts for their life force.

Did you hear the secret about some stores having pretty big sales?

I don't know how you all do it in other countries, but here in America, today is the day that begins this magical time of selfless giving in the most frantic, sleep-deprived, violent way possible.

That's right, sharpen your elbows, cause it's time for... what's that? The day after Thanksgiving passed and took with it all those unbelievable deals?? Damn.

Oh, yeah, that's right... THAT'S what my wife was doing while I was sleeping yesterday... Saving almost $2000 on appliances we needed to buy for our new house anyway. Thanks, desperate retailers of America!

And a special thanks to you, Sears, for narrowly winning your own battle against poor planning and organization to barely not totally mess everything up!

As for you, readers, even if you think you could never be lured down from your lofty position of righteous judgment --a seat I kept warm for many years-- into the fray that is Black Friday, I urge you to at least consider bypassing all that famous interminable-waiting and running and scratching and occasional-murdering while still getting almost all the other benefits-- shop online!

The best part is, when you're online, Black Friday isn't just Friday, so this post is still useful and timely!

Yes, awaken yourselves from those tryptophan-induced comas and remember the spirit of the season: buying more things than anyone would ever need for everyone you know (not forgetting that you are the first person you ever knew), and singlehandedly reviving a sagging economy somehow by demanding to pay retailers less than their cost for a choice selection of the most-wanted consumer goods.

In that very sacred vein, I point you in this direction, to my good friend and partner Amazon, which is offering unbelievably amazing prices for many, many different products this week:

I've only just begun my shopping there for this year, but as long as you don't buy the last thing of something I didn't know I wanted yet, I won't have to track you down and push-trip you while you're triumphantly carrying it from the mailbox a few days later.

Happy shopping!


FULL DISCLOSURE: I might come trip you anyway, just for old time's sake-- you just can't get that full experience online!

Also, as always, I do receive a commission for anything you purchase at Amazon as long as you get there from my site, but don't let that make you think I didn't get involved with them only because I know all sane people shop there at least sometimes, except for those who just haven't seen the light yet. Come into the light!