Hi there. I am a person who checks things out; no, not for safety purposes or legitimacy, I mean if someone mentions something I will be curious enough to push the button or open the door or, in web times such as these, click over to a site. Now, this is not an entirely horrible thing because on news sites, I have learned a lot about related stuff – stuff worth sticking away in my mind for the heck of just knowing it. And on some personal sites, I have found tremendously strong people who tell their stories intelligently and sensitively – people such as Sarah Bickle, Thomas’ mother. I still keep the light for Thomas in my window – changed the bulb just last week.

However, there are times when I wind up someplace where someone is spilling their guts about their family intrigues. And my eyes zoom along the page. Zoom! Or I will find a reference to bloggers feuding and glance in, watching the ping pong ball go back and forth.  Here’s a good one: I always found myself annoyed when people used the phrase “her/his private” to refer to a body part. Do you know I saw a reference to a place called Attack of the Redneck Mommy and went to take a quick look . . . and found a detailed description on how she dyed her pubic hair blue? Okay, that’s private.

Why am I writing about this? I don’t know. I do know. It’s kind of like Mt. Everest . . . You know, it’s there.

Summer and I sat down on the porch sofa when I returned from taking her mother to work and somehow one of us leaned right and the other left and we have been snoozing. It is a long sofa, but not that long, so old legs and young legs entangled and in moments of partial rousing, vied for space.

My head hurts so I am up, having sought out fast-acting aspirin,  regular Coke mixed with Diet C,  plus a wee bit of tylenol. In other words: The Cure Plus. Although I think at the moment I could do with a smidgen of Miss Mamie’s and Miss Emily’s father’s Recipe.

In the kitchen, I caught a stronger whiff of skunk and zeroed in on Sydney’s collar; I had not stressed during the bathing to take it OUTSIDE. I have sniffed some porch things and they are iffy, including Courage Bear, on whom Sydney buried his head on coming in after the event. My mother and aunt told the story that once when their mother had some old carriage robes that had been skunked, she consulted her Uncle Ed Olney, an old-timer and son of homesteaders about what to do. He said, “Burn them.”

UPDATE UPDATE: We just sniffed Spikey and, well, she’s sitting in the sun now as well.

I was here on the porch at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse thinking about getting some motivation to do something, anything that would improve the general state of things. We have had threatening clouds, sun, clouds, sun, clouds and so painting the little deck and fence was not an option. Cameron suggested, “Clean a toilet,” and I decided I’d trim weeds – just a few.

Now, my father could roll in poison ivy and not get it and my mother wasn’t allergic to it – her problem was only with poison oak until she got older and got a wee bit sensitive to poison ivy. Me? I don’t think I was allergic to any of those things all through the younger part of my life. Then, in my 40″s when we were living in the rolling suburbs of Cincinnati and had a ravine and creek on our property, I would go hiking in the new subdivision”s woods. That’s when I got a little rash.

My older immune system was giving out, just like my mother’s; I had poison ivy.  The red itchy skin was mostly on my legs and I complained a lot. Then my good friend Joan got poison ivy and had running blisters all over her body and I thought, “Oh,” I guess I’m not too allergic to it. I felt sort of sheepish, but being a hypochondriac, took it in stride. What’s one more sheepish episode in a life of death scenes?

That was then, but I thought of it today . . . when I went out to pull weeds. I was pretty blase about it. I mean I figured I would shower afterwards. So, anyway, I’m out there pulling and clipping and Cameron comes out and asks if he can help and I say okay, let’s get this little tree that has come up by the foundation out.

See, it just looked like a little growth to him, but I had been trimming it back for years and knew beneath the bit of foliage was a short, fat TRUNK. We started in, clipping the little branchlets and the trunk was revealed. He went to get a saw and I worked to make certain the cable cord that ran behind it was out of the way. Well, guess what? The cable was encased in tree trunk. The little tree had taken revenge for my constant pruning – it took the cable hostage.

So went at it at ground level – Cameron powered the saw and I helped “guide” it. We grew sweaty and I found myself lying in right on the ground with green non-grass things dusting my skin. We got it loose.

That’s when I got my panic attack about poison anything and that’s when Cameron saw the toad. He kept pointing and I kept being unable to see it. People came out and became toad-watchers and I concentrated on showering the potential rash away.

I decided to shower in the basement for reasons you don’t want to know and ran down clad in my terrycloth robe. As I stepped into the water, I suddenly realized the poison oil, if it were there on me, would have come off on the terrycloth and be waiting for me when I finished washing. Ack, ack. What to do? What to do? What to do?

I turned the robe inside out. Now keep in mind all the time I was fretting and showering, I heard screams from above. They had corralled the toad and had brought him in and he possibly at one point was almost an escapee in the house.

That’s where we are now . . .  Stay tuned. Maybe the next post will be about the crazy toad girl of Kendallville.

Today Der Bingle is 61, but we had a little party yesterday because he is leaving early today to get back to the Ohio Redoubt of the West Facing Cave. We’ve never been too much of birthday people in our family, but Alison tends to be . . . and this is what came about:

I was called to take a picture of the cake, but the box was taped shut at the time. This did not deter me.

See, here I’m on my way to the cake . . .

Having arrived at the cake, I took this picture.

*******

Meanwhile, Summer was making the perfect hamburgers, using the press we used when I was a child younger than she.

Notice how the edges are nice and smooth – just like I taught her . . . unlike the splatty kind her mother makes despite my nagging.

*******

Moving back to the cake, it is open – the box, that is.

And, yes, a little Grandpa/Summer interaction – one of Summer’s neck hugs . . .

And, alas, Summer’s revenge on poor, lovable, furry, old Grover – She ATE him.

No, no, no . . . this is not a psychological crisis. I just really don’t know why I am here typing on my cow; I have nothing to say. It could be I am hiding out here, grabbing a wee bit more  downtime before I get to doing something – and let me tell you I have many “somethings” to do. And they are chores . . . and my famous “experimental” fixing things activities. Oh, it could get out of hand. You know, I still haven’t figured out where the main water turn off to this one little bathroom is. The toilet doesn’t have a turn off under the tank and in the furnace room below, the only valve I found was for the hot water. I hope I don’t have to turn off the house water. I can’t do that until I am really, really confident in what I am doing to the toilet or else I would be – okay, no joke here because I tell the kids scatological jokes aren’t clever, they are just snicker things. And snicker doesn’t count.

Of course, there are some situations where snickers just burst out – like at the family reunion when this 80+ year old lady paused in chewing her potato salad and made some graphic and clinical  remarks about her husband’s penis and his prostate. Actually, we didn’t snicker; we were concentrating too hard on keeping our lips pressed together so food didn’t spray across the table . . . and I think my mother was almost prostrate under the table. Yes, yes, it really happened. We talk about it sometimes and . . . snicker. So, okay, maybe this wasn’t a good story to tell and maybe this is a reason why I shouldn’t be here at the cow and should be doing something productive.

This is the family reunion where two people weren’t there because they were dead – like for decades dead. The dead woman was the second wife of the dead man and she always made a jell-o for reunions that didn’t want to come out of the dish. People would take the spoon, think they had a scoop on it only to find there was always a filament of jell-0 ready to thwang it back into the pan just as it was stretched almost to a plate. I kid you not. This was way before my time, of course, so maybe people exaggerated over time.

I do know this, though. My mother said of this second wife: “Well, your grandmother never had them over for dinner.” Okaaaaay.

I really loved my grandma. I can still hear her voice and smell her and feel the starch in her housedresses; it fascinates me that people who are so dear to me in the continuing generational flow have no memory of her at all. Well, SHE would have completed many chores by this time in the morning so I guess I will bestir myself.

Say, I need Der Bingle to guest post about his grandmother. Whoa, now there was a force to be reckoned with . . . and right around the corner from me is the little Sunday School chair from the Denver church she painted  – along with his grandfather – for our older son. I mean she and he painted it . . . she didn’t paint Grandpa Vance.

I have just got to get out of here.

Well, okay, it’s not the mat; it’s the floor – the one with the new water-based polyurethane. Some strange things are happening around the edges in the appliance part of the kitchen. Things such as turning white and/or being very, very dry. Things such as  . . . GASP . . . peeling. That means I will be down on the floor with the sander again going around those edges. ACK. Yes, I know, that’s a three- letter word in a four-letter situation. I guess this is one of those times when you know you are just going to have to “do it again” and you are beyond four-letter words and up to those with five letters such as “shucks.” Oh, crap, that’s six letters . . . and crap is four, after all.

I suppose it comes down to a long sigh. Listen for it . . . hear it in the wind? That was me. Probably the worse part is the response of those around me when I refer to starting up the ole sander again.

But I didn’t start yesterday. No, yesterday we had one of our impromptu parties – ice in the cooler on the porch, little lantern lights, DVD playing. We watched Talladega Nights and The Pink Panther. Hey, it was raining outside. And we had chips and dip.

Oh, look . . . It’s rainy outside this morning. Maybe I should just keep partying. Or call together a committee to suggest approaches to the floor situation. Yeah, we can meet on the porch with chips and dip and ice and drinks.

Yo, we have a small backyard project here . . . in progress, dontcha know. Could take months, years, whatever. This is the scoop: our small backyard has always looked kind of bad and this spring I decided to move up from kind of bad to sort of bad and spread grass seed and then I actually sprinkled. Summer, of course, had some truly wet moments, but I am not going to rehash that now – other than to say I was often screaming, “Come in through the back vestibule!!!”

The grass actually started to take hold a bit in that shadowy pathway between the clubhouse and the outcropping of the garage and I even planted hostas along the brick wall of said garage – the wall that has northern exposure.  And I seeded elsewhere and picked up debris and planted some apparently mutant tomatoes. We started heading out that way . . . and we started to wear a squashed down, soon to be muddy PATH. ack ack ack

So, time for a modification in the plan – extending stepping stones; I mentioned it to Der Bingle who embraced the idea. Yesterday morning he went looking at stones and he came back beaming at his find – pebbled feet. I was with him right through the pebbled part and then I snorted at “feet”.  However, he was so enthusiastic and I knew the kids would get a kick out of them (feet, get it? hahahahaha).

Cameron and I went this morning and got five feet and three crescents and here they are:

Notice the snow shovel???  And the twigs for the firepit? So AmeliaJake.

And speaking of AJ, that’s my little foot in the very lower right corner.

Here’s little Sydney all nice and handsome and adorable and charming . . .

And here is Sydney all forlorn . . .

And here is Summer heading at me and my camera . . . Uh, is that a fist?

This is not the best picture – I had to use my cell phone because I had forgotten for the zillionth time to bring a “real” one. I took it from the driver’s side and Sydney will tell  you I had to turn the car around and back up to get that side looking out at the bear. Sydney probably thought I was having a stroke. No, no, AmeliaJake, keep heading out, turn on your signal, go left toward home. What is this circling crap? don’t make me have to bark at you.