Oy! Motherhood.

pudge-less fudge

ohmigod i'm in love with these

all of them. every one. the whole single serving thing with fat free frozen yo is the best. thing. ever.

and holy moly, pluto doesn't qualify as a planet anymore?? as larry the cable guy would say, "what in the world?!"

good thing we didn't buy all the planet and star cosmic works for the school.

an unreasonable woman

i'm reading a book whose title i borrowed for this post. its author, diane wilson, is sort of the down home version of erin brockovitch, and although the reading can be a bit rough at times (and let's face it, everyone's can--i, myself, am rather put out by my own last post here!), vascillating strongly between colloquialism and intellectualism, it's a great read--especially for the environmentally aware and food system centric among us. as it turns out, however, my favorite bit of the book has nothing to do with food or the environment. it's this part, about women:

I was beginning to discover the difference between women and other women, and it wasn't measured by filling in their weights or their shoe sizes on a piece of paper or knowing what color of house they were washing their dirty dishes in. A woman's difference was measured by whether she listened to herself at all.

for some reason, right now especially, this resonates with me. i find there are so many women around me who don't listen to themselves at all or who think they are listening and instead are running around scatterbrained trying to get their kids into programs two years in advance, or filling up their drawers and closets with the spoils of increasingly frequent marathon shopping trips, or who can't seem to settle on one thing or another because they aren't seeing themselves, they're seeing themselves reflected in everyone else or are wishing they were someone else or something. i don't know. i don't even know how to articulate my thoughts on this with any clarity, i just know that this resonates because i have found myself disappointed with lots of women lately. women who are unable to make decisions for themselves without first consulting every other single human in a 100-mile radius, or women who tell everyone what they want to hear at the expense of themselves and others, women who've given up being something themselves and are so heavily focused on their daughters that it threatens to suffocate them.

and these are all women who once did listen to themselves.

where along the way do we consent to lose our thoughts, our convictions? why do so many of us just seem to give up and become part of life's backdrop?

that's all.

carry on.

infestations!

yes, that bit about something living under my deck, that was some serious foreshadowing, people.

it was exactly one year ago that i thought i saw a rat on the rabbit hutch. one year, literally to the day, after i saw the offending beast on the rabbit hutch that i innocently opened the garbage hut J built and saw a scattering of three quarter-inch long, giant mouse-looking poop. i groaned, slammed shut the garbage thingy door and marched my google-y ass right back inside whereupon i consulted dr. google with keywords like, "animal scat," "opossum poop," and "rat turds." and "photos," of course. one site said opossum poop dissolved quickly and was rarely seen. there were no actual pictures, just sketches. (opossum scat is, apparently, the sasquatch of wild animal poop.) i squinted at them, willing them to be longer and narrower and more bumpy. briefly, and i mean *very* briefly, i considered doing a scientific experiment to see how quickly my little personal poop gems might dissolve because i was hopeful it was just a family of opossums living under there. i mean, we'd had them before. they'd come and gone and done no harm, so i hoped and hoped and waited for J to come home and give me his studied opinion. i even tried to charm one of my friends into coming over to look at the poop. i dunno, something about poop and rat being mentioned in the same sentence seemed to turn her off.

superassdog of the world was going bonkers on the deck steps. she was clawing and barking and chewing and sniffing and when i said, "get it, george!" she went even crazier and tried to stuff her fat self under the deck. i locked the kids in the house and waited for J to come home. he looked at the poop and the following morning took the boy out for supplies. to my horror, he returned with three giant rat traps. after nearly snapping his thumb off in one he came inside to get ready for our prospective parents' meeting, which, thankfully, was being held elsewhere.

off we went to this lovely, perfect, air-conditioned house filled with all the right things and done up in just the right way. the meeting went swimmingly and afterwards we hung out and ate and chatted. i had blissfully forgotten the heat, the sticky humidity, the unwashed breakfast dishes in my kitchen sink, and the pooping presence under my back deck.

well that all came to a screeching halt when we returned to find a real rat in one of the traps. i mean, just like that--not more than six hours later, there it was, hard evidence of what had suddenly and silently moved in under our steps.*** i was fahreaaaaking out. i mean, right?

i emailed dizzy (and there's profanity--lots of it. most of all i would like to apologize in advance to the mater, who reads occasionally, but in my own defense--it's rats!):

...the dog was going nuts by the steps to our back deck and then i lifted the lid on the garbage collection thingy box thing and there were droppings. i mean dRoPPinGS that were too big to be from a mouse...you see where i'm going with this? and mo-ther. FUCk-ER, john set out a trap and caught a motherfucking giant fucking fuckwit fucking fucker fuck fuckety fuck fuck RAT in less than six hours.

and you know what that means, right?

WE'RE FUCKING MOVING. WE'RE LEAVING ALL THE CONTENTS OF OUR FUCKING RAT ASS CONTAMINATED SHIT (which is everything in this fucking house because oh. my. god. RIGHT?) RIGHT HERE IN THIS RATTY ASSED RAT HOUSE AND WE'RE MOVING TO A NEW HOME WITHOUT RATS.

this simply cannot be happening. it's a nightmare. a hideous nightmare.

and meanwhile, what good is george, really

(i swear to god, we are NOT white trash. we really are not. i have no idea what these rats are thinking setting up shop here under my deck, but they need to take their fucking rat wagon train right on out of here or they'll all get their necks snapped)

(and, today is the one day of my life that i am thrilled to be a woman who does EVERYTHING in the world in her house because john had to deal with the rat. and i would do everything in the world in my house JUST SO I DON'T HAVE TO TAKE DEAD RATS OUT OF RAT TRAPS.)

i really did go a bit hysterical. i put a moratorium on backyard play, announced a resolution never to use the back door again, and issued an edict that the range hood fan must remain on at all times, day and night, because no rat will try to climb through something with a fan spinning in it. i made a very loud announcement that i will never again put out the garbage or feed the rabbit. and most of all, i took every opportunity to work the word "rat" into every sentence of every conversation i had with my parents, husband, or business partner. i wanted them, the only people i would dare to tell about the rat problem, to be reminded at every turn of the horror that awaited me just outside the back door. J seemed suddenly to be in a constant state of annoyance with a side of guilt. he would roll his eyes and then whine about how he thought i thought he had something to do with their untimely arrival.

and then wasps moved into the hollow space at the bottom of screen door at the front of the house. every time i opened and closed the screen door angry wasps flew out and threatened to sting me or my babies. we were suddenly reduced to sneaking out the front door so as not to disturb the hive or running all hell for leather out the back door to beat the rats to the back gate.

the rat man came and put out a half dozen traps and took a check for $105. for a mere $65 a pop he'll come and check the traps. and for $375 he'll fix the back deck so nothing can move under there again--not even skunks, which he seemed to think were a worse threat than the rats. petunia i can handle--rats with long pink tails are so not putting me in my happy place.

other than that, life is good. how's things with all of you?

***for those of you who might be wondering whether these little horrors have been around since the first rat sighting i can safely say, after meeting with the pest control guy today, that these rats were brandy spanking new to the area. he seemed genuinely shocked that they decided to take up residence here. i'm assuming his shocked stemmed not from the idea that rats just don't go live under decks around here, but because the interior of my house is so neat and tidy that he simply can't believe that the rats picked us as their people.