Monthly Archives: September 2013

Mousetastrophe

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Friday afternoon, the kids were at a birthday party and I was basking in the glory of having crossed every item off my to-do list. I was feeling pretty good about myself; maybe even a bit smug. I was wiping off the kitchen countertop and opened the cupboard underneath the sink to throw something in the garbage, when I saw something strange. At first I thought I had spilled coffee grounds, but no. No, I always take the little compost bucket out of the cupboard when I throw the coffee grounds away. I moved the compost bucket, and saw more strange black things. My stomach gave a lurch and I googled “mouse droppings.”

That smug, happy feeling dissipated instantly. I took everything out of the cupboard, grabbed the bleach, and started cleaning. I had only a few minutes before picking up the children from the party, so I piled the garbage bags, rags, sponges, garbage pail and compost back under the now bleachy-clean sink cupboard. After returning home, I called my husband in a semi-panic, and as I did so I opened up the lazy susan where I keep the flour, oatmeal, and other baking needs. “OH MY GOD” I screamed into the phone. “THEY’RE IN HERE TOO!” I immediately hung up the phone, threw out the open bag of oatmeal, and bleached that cupboard as well. My husband was working on something “more major” than a “mouse” and so it would be a while before he was home. 

Now, I’m a feminist. I shovel snow in the winter, I have been known to clean the gutters, a few weeks ago I even got on a ladder and pulled the decorative scarecrows out of the garage loft. But mice? No. I did what any girl would do in my situation: I called my parents. My dad answered the phone, and in response to his normal salutation I began shrieking that there was a MOUSE in the HOUSE and it was in the CUPBOARD and AIEEEEEEEE. My dad listened for a few minutes, then said what all dads say when faced with hysterical daughters: “Here, I’ll let you talk to your mother.” Within thirty minutes my dad was at my house, setting up traps under the sink and in the lazy susan: two snap traps and one “mouse inn”.

At this point I felt like burning the whole house to the ground, or maybe having a stroke, but on the advice of my husband I poured myself a glass of wine, ready to prepare dinner. SHAKY, but ready to make dinner. Then, I heard it. I looked under the sink and the little door to the “mouse inn” was closed. AIEEEEEE. Mice mice MICE. Not two minutes after that, I heard a loud bang against the front window. A large smear, studded with feathers, was on the glass, and a bird lay motionless in the front garden. Mouse under the sink. Dead bird in the front garden. Possibly more mice in the house – who knows? I am not a catastrophizer. Normally, I can roll with the punches. But at this point I basically felt I was being overrun by vermin and there was a dead bird in the front yard and I couldn’t take it anymore. THE MICE COULD BE ANYWHERE, I thought. At that point, I broke. I started sobbing. I sobbed while making dinner. I sobbed while the children ate – I couldn’t eat. I cried so much that Mark begged me to please stop being so sad and Jake said Mom, we can get the mice, the mice are small, it’s okay, Mom. I just cried and cried while cleaning up the children’s dinner. The children fled downstairs to the safety of their video games while I cried. Two hours of crying later, my husband came home.

Husband: You have GOT to pull yourself together.

Me: *ceaseless sobbing*

Husband: It’s just a MOUSE. Look, I stopped at Canadian Tire. I bought all these traps.

Me: *hysteria*

Husband: You’re letting yourself get all worked up. You need to pull yourself together!

Me: *gulping, choking, sobbing* I think there’s a mouse under the sink.

At that point, my husband threw the “mouse inn” directly into the garbage, along with the dead bird. I hardly slept at all on Friday night. I kept hearing things. My husband kept telling me that I was “letting myself” get “all worked up” but it turns out I was right. Because Saturday morning I slowly opened the cupboard to find all the bait gone but no mice in the traps. There was apparently a mouse party, with droppings on top of the compost container, and in the lazy susan, a similarly stripped mouse trap, holes in the bags of chia and quinoa, and NO DEAD MICE.

Later my mother commented that maybe the mice were vegan, and my friend Lyn thought that next thing you know they would be into the nutritional yeast. FORTUNATELY the nutritional yeast is kept in a glass mason jar, so that was safe, but as for the rest, well.

It turns out the traps my dad had brought over were not working – obviously – and so my husband started setting up the variety of traps that he had bought: old fashioned snap traps, poisonous bait ones, and the humane catch-and-release kind. Just as a foreshadowing, I will inform you that the humane traps were also the least effective.

While he was setting traps, I went out and bought mason jars and stainless steel containers, and the rest of my day was spent putting all foodstuffs into such containers. The upside of this gross event is that I have super clean and organized cupboards now.

My husband went back to the office, leaving me to take the kids to karate. At this point I was nearly insane with lack of sleep, fretting about the Hanta virus, and the (probably ridiculous) thought that I would one day open up my sweater drawer to find a horde of mice nesting there. After karate I gingerly opened the cupboard to discover that the only thing grosser than no mouse in the trap is to find a mouse in the trap. My husband was a good three hours from coming home and so after I heaved for a few minutes I called my parents – again – and my dad came over with his thick leather gloves to deal with the aftermath. Dads and their daughters, am I right? I was awash in gratitude as my dad reset the trap, and it wasn’t five minutes after he left when I heard a snap. And I use this as a cautionary tale for those of you sensitive people, like me. If you hear a snap, don’t think that the trap just “went off” “by itself”. I opened the cupboard to see a writhing, twitching mouse. At that point I just went to lie down, feeling like I was having a nervous breakdown.

I’m happy to say that after my husband came home, there were a few more “snaps”, and he sealed around the dryer vent where we think the problem originated. There haven’t been any more issues since Saturday; the cupboards are still clean and smelling festively of bleach and peppermint oil – the latter of which is apparently a mouse deterrent.

So, that was my weekend. Well, not all of it was misery and desperation. There was also this:

The boys got their yellow belts! They’re so proud and so am I. A bright (yellow) spot in an otherwise vermin-ridden weekend.

Parents Just Don’t Understand, or How I Killed The Tooth Fairy

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I’ve been singing in my head wake me up when September ends because this month has been crazy, and here it is, almost over. Of course, I don’t see October slowing down significantly. Wake me up when October ends. I’ve been busy in a silly kind of way, with things that are not terribly important world-wide but are kind of important in my world, and so I’m like a hummingbird on speed. Vrrrrooooooooommmmm. My husband asked, plaintively, if I could possibly start sleeping in a little later than 4:30 am and I realized I have turned into a boring sort of person who says things like “But I have to bake macarons and write about it and I have to call all these people for the silent auction and I want to wash all the sheets and clean the bathroom and I need to get the agenda posted for the SC/PA meeting and…” and by the time I say “bake macarons” he has tuned out from my dull monologue. I’m even boring myself, just writing this.

But oh! There have been a number of other things happening this week, other than school council meetings and baked goods. Today was the Terry Fox run and I was a little worried about it since it was 4 degrees this morning and Jake called me from school to ask to come home yesterday afternoon, which has never happened. He has a cold, that’s all, but for him it presents as red, watery eyes and the kind of misery that goes along with not being able to see anything as a result. He seems okay today and is back to class; in any case, my husband reminded me that being able to perform and work while not feeling 100% is actually a very useful life skill. It is, isn’t it? It’s not like we can call it a day every time we have the sniffles, and spend the day lying on the couch eating cinnamon toast and watching terrible daytime television. It’s probably good that kids learn to suck it up, buttercup, at least when it’s something minor and not a FEVER or BARFING or something gross and contagious, in which case I always keep the kids home.

We’ve been having many what do you want to be when you grow up conversations lately, and I am telling you, it’s very entertaining. The main goal in this mercenary household is to be wealthy, or, more specifically, to “Make more money than you, Dad, and get a nicer car.” That would be my eight year old talking, who has decided he wants to be a trader. Given his math skills and his generally dickish attitude, I think this would be an excellent career choice for him. Mark wants to be an engineer, which he is also very well suited for. He has what I fondly think of as an engineering personality; those of you who know any engineers will know exactly what I mean, I think. This is the part where I’m supposed to say, passionately, that I just want them to be happy, which is true, of course, but I do think a person is happiest when pursuing a solid career, and so I will continue to cheer on their engineering/ trading/ finance interests while doling out more math worksheets.

When I was a child I wanted to be a concert pianist and/ or a great theatre actress; I ended up with two economics degrees and working on a trade floor as a quantitative analyst. What I did not envision was my current career, at least this week, of being an old-timey dentist. I have been pulling out a lot of teeth in the past seven days, just like one of those dentists in the wild west, except with a decided lack of whiskey. The kids have suddenly developed two things: an alarming number of loose teeth and a complete lack of patience with said loose teeth. I’m getting really good at pulling them out, I have to say. Wham, bam, tooth out. And then there’s the little issue of payment. In lieu of my husband donning a tutu and a wand with a tooth on it, he simply doles out whatever change he has in his pockets when he gets home. This led to Mark’s receipt of nearly $5 in change for a molar. I heard him telling a friend this, who lamented that HE only gets $2 a tooth, to which I said gently – because I didn’t want anyone to feel bad or anyone to whom I have given birth to be boasting – that case was just because that was what Dad happened to have in his pocket. To which the little friend said “His Dad? The Tooth Fairy brings me the money.” Mark gave me the wide eyed, raised eyebrow look I usually give to the children for such verbal slipups, and later said to me, sharply, that his friend still believed in the Tooth Fairy and I shouldn’t have said anything at all.

Parents. We just don’t understand.

For Little House Fans (everyone else please wait until next post)

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This weekend I spent some time reading articles about the Little House on the Prairie books, and how Rose Wilder Lane, one of the founders of what is known as modern Libertarianism and also Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, heavily edited the original manuscripts in order to further her political agenda. I knew this already, to some extent. After all, there is a lot of discussion, mostly from Pa, about being free and independent and about how you can never depend on anyone but yourself. God helps those who help themselves, pull yourself up by your boot straps, et cetera. I was surprised to find, however, that certain details have been changed, hypocritically, that are absolutely central to the story. I knew that the Ingalls family had illegally squatted on land in what is now Kansas, “Indian Territory” land that belonged to the native people and that was not up for settlement, no matter how huffy Pa got at the end of Little House on the Prairie. “I’ll not stay here to be taken away by the soldiers like an outlaw!” Ah, Pa, but an outlaw you were.

What I didn’t know was that Mary’s education at the Iowa College for the Blind was paid for by the government of Dakota. That’s a pretty major detail, since in all the books Laura was teaching school in wretched conditions at a very young age, in order to earn money to send and keep Mary at college. I guess that what poor Laura was doing was earning money just to help keep her family from being completely impoverished and destitute. Poor Laura! Living in that shack in the middle of the god-forsaken prairie, forty below with the wind always blowing and the snow so deep that walking to the schoolhouse was almost beyond her strength, staying with a homicidal woman who threatened her husband with a knife and who was almost certainly suffering from deep depression. Not that I blame her. Mrs. Brewster, the least understood woman in the history of the Little House books. If I were stuck in a similar situation, where my days were spent entirely a) sweeping out the one-room shack, b) cooking two meals a day that consist only of potatoes and salt pork, and c) maybe doing the laundry when it wasn’t minus 40, I’d probably want to murder someone too. And yet, Laura went through this to help with the family’s terrible financial situation, and not to merely send her sister to school. Depressing indeed.

I recently read a book about the Ingalls family; I’ve always kind of wondered about long-suffering Ma, who essentially packed up the family with a cheery countenance any time her crazy husband decided to pick up and move cross-country. Was Ma constantly on laudanum? Or was she some kind of earthly angel? Here’s the depressing answer: Caroline was getting kind of old-maidish – she was a schoolteacher, as well – and Charles was considered to be extremely handsome and dashing. His proposal to schoolmarmish Caroline was a huge surprise to friends and family, who did not think that she was his equal in attractiveness and spirit. THEY DID NOT THINK SHE WAS PRETTY ENOUGH FOR CHARLES. Take a look at this picture and see for yourself:

 
Perhaps it’s my bias against Old Crazy Blue Eyes, but I think it’s Ma who has the looks in that family. We all know couples who don’t “match”, as it were, but I don’t think it’s PA who has stooped beneath him here. Well, we all know the depressing truth of the matter, and that is that women’s appearances have always been a kind of currency. Apparently Caroline did not have enough currency to afford herself a non-crazy husband. But I digress: discussions of women and their worth as a person vis a vis their personal appearance shall appear on another blog post. See also: future discussion of Sense and Sensibility. 
 
 
 

 
Ugh, I’m sure that was a styling beard at the time but I find it repugnant. Of course, I freely (and independently!) admit my bias against facial hair, given that I even found Jon Hamm’s Emmy beard to be repulsive. This is a matter of personal opinion, of course, and I know there are a lot of you out there who dig the mountain man, or at least the stubbly, look.
 
None of this, of course, bothered me when I was a child. I read those books cover to cover many times and I was absolutely enchanted by the pioneer lifestyle. It didn’t occur to me that those ten hour drives to visit my grandparents in the back of a sedan with two brothers, a dog, and all our toys and books to keep us occupied for that time was nothing compared with riding in a covered wagon for months at a time. It didn’t occur to me that if something happened to Pa when he was walking hundreds of miles to find work because he borrowed money he couldn’t pay back to build a fancy house – with glass windows and an actual stove – or when he went to buy supplies somewhere in Kansas, or any other time, that life would go from dreary to desperate in a flash. It would be all the worse for a woman left alone with four young girls in the middle of nowhere. Back then, if something had happened to Pa, the very best option Ma would have had would be to marry someone, anyone, and she would be forever beholden to whomever would take on such a burden, as it were. It’s a very sad thought, to be sure. I guess Crazy Pa was better than No Pa At All.
 
What did occur to me, as a child, was that Mary, with her golden curls, was much more beautiful than Laura, with her straight brown hair. This is what I looked like at age seven:
 
 
Notice I’m reading Little Town on the Prairie; maybe Almanzo has touched Laura’s mitten tip. Anyway, please note that my hair is BROWN and STRAIGHT. This is the message from the Little House books: blonde = beautiful, brunette = ugly. I may be sensitive to this since my best friend at the time had gorgeous, thick, wavy, white blonde hair. Wherever we went, her hair was commented on and gushed over. I have never gotten over that, apparently, since my hair issues could fill a book.
 
In reality, though, this is Laura:
 
 
and this is Mary:
 
 
Draw whatever conclusions you will, but I think Laura sells herself a bit short, no?

Drinking and blogging, what can go wrong?

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1) Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes I like to check my “stats” on this blog to see what brings people – not my usual, beloved readers, but different people – to this little space on the internet. And every time I remember why I don’t check those often. Recently, the most popular search term – other than, sweetly enough, “girl in a boy house”  – is “braless” or some permutation of the term, such as “braless teen” or “braless vacation”. I didn’t think I talked about bralessness that much, really. Other than when I’m on vacation – when I am wearing a bathing suit or a shelf-bra tank – I am never braless. Not even to bed. I just don’t like walking around with sad, deflated, drooping breasts. Frankly, I’m surprised the term is such a draw. Bralessness is not actually that attractive.

2) Other hot search terms are “70s porn stache” and “hot male moustache pic” which makes me wonder if, on some other type of blog, there are a lot of hot female moustache pics. The internet is a magical place.

3) Proof of the true inner Nicole: I want this for Christmas SO BADLY

From modcloth.com

4) I also really, really want this apron:

From modcloth.com

I have had kind of an irritating day, that I cannot write about, but believe me, it’s been irritating. I don’t think it’s just the combination of full moon and ladies’ holidays. I think I’m justified in my irritants, although I have some advice: when you are already feeling irritable, do not go to Wal Mart, even if you are all out of liquid soap. In any event, I’m kicking back with a glass (read: bottle) of wine and my laptop, what could possibly go wrong. I should probably heed my spam commenter who said, and I quote, “fatty liver disease alcohol consumption fatty liver disease alcohol consumption visit my website alcoholic fatty liver gastroenterology emedicine”. Okay.

Judgy spam commenter. I much preferred the one who said “We’re a bunch of volunteers and opening a new scheme in our community. Your site offered us with helpful information to work on. You’ve done an impressive process and our entire neighbourhood might be thankful to you. Visit my webpage fuck.net.”

I do like the idea of an entire neighbourhood being thankful to me. I’m not sure if I have the same journey to an end in mind as the good people at fuck.net, but I do like to be helpful.

Sing a song

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I don’t know if it’s because of the full moon tomorrow or what, but I’ve been having one of those super productive days in which I actually amaze myself. I had a pan of vegan peppermint brownies (minties, maybe) in the oven before 8:00 am, and a separate pan of vegan non-peppermint brownies baked a few hours later. Why all the brownies, you may ask? It’s parent-teacher interviews tomorrow night, and I am bringing (apparently a lot of) brownies and pasta salad to the teacher potluck. I may have to sample them, though, just to ensure quality control. The house smells amazing; brownies are a nice project on a rainy and cold fall day.

I also went to the grocery store, and much to my delight I made it in and out prior to the arrival of the seniors’ bus. If you do not think that is something of note, then you have never had the back of your legs nudged vigorously by an old lady behind you in the lineup who is sure that she is going to miss the bus back to the lodge, despite the fact that said bus doesn’t leave for another forty-five minutes. You have never had to navigate around carts left randomly in an aisle, three wide, while a gaggle of elderly women talk about the virtues of store brand bran flakes versus All-Bran. You have never had to turn your cart around in the produce section because the lineup at the pharmacy is blocking the aisle where they keep the mixed greens. And none of these things happened to me today because I made it there before the bus even pulled up. It’s a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

While in the baking aisle, I noticed this:

Now, I know that sometimes we all need something quick and easy, but this seems really kind of icky to me. Cans of plain frosting, add your own flavour with the little artificial flavouring packets. People, it’s VERY EASY to flavour your own frosting; you do not need to do this. I IMPLORE YOU. Frosting is one of the easiest things to make in the history of the kitchen arts. The hardest thing about making frosting is ensuring that you remove the beaters from the mixer before licking them, lest you accidentally turn the mixer on and have something terrible happen to your tongue. I just wrote about how to make different kinds of frostings over at Yummy Mummy Club – check it out if you want a quick and easy cupcake recipe.

Jake with his birthday cupcake.


Last night my husband was watching Shark Tank (I KNOW) and there were two ladies on there who had started their own company, called Wicked Good Cupcakes, shipping cupcakes nationwide in little mason jars. It seemed to be the most adorable thing ever, and I briefly considered trying this – cupcakes in mason jars, not shipping nationwide – but then I became puzzled on how one would actually get the cupcakes in the jars without them getting squished or crumbling to pieces. It is one of those Pinterest-y ideas that seems So! Awesome! but ends up with someone crying and/or having a major self-esteem crisis.

Speaking of wicked good things, did you read that Mark Wahlberg has just recently graduated high school, after originally dropping out in ninth grade? Hooray, Marky Mark (and hubba hubba). It’s nice to see celebrities doing good things, instead of making moronic political/ societal/ vaccination-based comments that make me despair for the state of the world. Mark Wahlberg instead wrote that he wanted to be a good example for his kids. What a guy!

 


I KNOW.

Completely unrelated, I have had Elton John’s Levon stuck in my head all day. At this point I am pretty much begging any other song to take over, since I’ve caught myself singing out loud several times. He was born a pauper to a pawn on a Christmas Day when the New York Times said God is dead and the war’s begun….HE SHALL BE LEEEEEEEEEVON. I desperately need something, anything else to take up this space in my head. I will take any earworm suggestions at all. ANYTHING. He shall be Levon, he shall be a good man…MAKE IT STOP PLEASE.

13 Month Old Baby Broke The Looking Glass

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Anyone superstitious out there? I am not, generally speaking, except for believing strongly in karma and the zodiac. Say what you will, all Leos I’ve ever met have been show-offs, and all Tauruses I’ve ever met (myself included) are stubborn as the day is long. But Friday the 13th? Meh. My friend Hannah will probably disagree with me, but I have no adverse feelings about it. If someone chases after me with a hockey mask and a chainsaw, I might change my tune but for now, it’s just the day Jake brought in three dozen cookies to school to celebrate his birthday, which is on Sunday.

Three dozen cookies. For his class. Because he has thirty-one kids in his class. I’ll leave it at that. I will not go into details about how I drilled my homeschooling friend Nan about the materials she uses and then promptly ordered them, not because I’m planning on homeschooling but because I’m planning on Tiger Mom-ing* the hell out of the kids since there’s no way they will be able to get what I want them to get out of school in a class of thirty-one. Mark has over thirty kids in his class too. But here I can feel myself working my way up into a frenzy again, and so I will let it go. OM SHANTI.

*I’m not really going to become a Tiger Mom, but I am going to have to supplement what they are doing in class, because as one friend said their math work seems like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Yo Gabba Gabba. 5 x 6 = ___. Explain your work.

I need to get off this topic, quickly, lest I explode. Cookies. Here are the cookies Jake took to school – stars for the birthday star!

You know me, guys, I’m all natural ingredients and made from scratch and spinach smoothies and kale chips but when it comes to birthdays, I don’t fuck around. SUGAR COOKIES ALL THE WAY. They are made from scratch but they also have food colouring in them OMG. How else does one make “turquoise” frosting, I ask you?

I was doing some shopping earlier in the week. Mark’s idea for Jake’s birthday gift was to buy five of his favourite chocolate bars, wrap them up, and then hide them around the house. Clues will be given for this delicious treasure hunt. It’s very sweet, literally, and also I need to remember to put the dog outside for this activity.

I also looked in my favourite sleepwear/ lingerie store for new pajamas. The Blissdom Canada conference is coming up in less than three weeks, and on the last night they are having a wrap-up pajama party. PAJAMA PARTY SQUEE. I haven’t been to one of those in many years, but since my sleepwear verges on the ridiculous – pink and white pajamas with a hummingbird motif, recently – I thought maybe I should look for some new ones. This is what I look like on a typical Friday night, and yes, my husband is super lucky:

So I wandered into La Vie En Rose and walked out without pajamas – they were all either a) super sexy and therefore not really appropriate for a conference with women, at which I am going to try to maintain a somewhat professional aura while drinking copious amounts of wine, or b) kind of like the hummingbird pajamas, but with puppies, kitties, or ice cream cones on them. I did not go in there to buy hippo sock-slippers, but hippo sock-slippers I did buy.

It would take a stronger woman than me to look at those hippos and walk away, especially considering the emotional attachment to hippos around here. Poor Jake, yesterday he realized that next Tuesday would have been Foggy’s 48th birthday. There was much weeping and sadness, which was an inauspicious start to the day. I felt very, very sad for him as he cried softly into his Shreddies.

After I bought the hippo socks, I looked for a new lipgloss, and I found a shade called Wine Stain. I did not buy it. I feel that, while that may be a natural weekend look for me, I would rather have a lip colour that does not look like I’ve been a lush. I went for the cutely named Maple Sugar instead.

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The winner of my giveaway is Lynn! Hope this gift makes you feel better about the whole ant/ hornet thing you went through this summer (the bug-phobic of you will not want to click that link. It will make you want to burn your own house down.) Lynn, I’ll send you your prize soon – if I survive the next week (details to follow if I survive it….) Thanks everyone for playing along! xoxo