Last week, a crew of men from our church put seven two-ton-each cement barricades up in the field that the pickup drove through before hitting David’s house. These barricades are placed in an arc such that, if some drunk decides to continue his maniacal drive from the Lost Creek Road straight through the dead end and onto David’s property, he would indeed find it to be a ‘dead’ end.
Before doing this, Robert went to city council, or some such place, and asked someone if the city would do it.
“No,” replied the man, “because someone could get hurt, and we might get sued.”
“We’ll do it ourselves, then,” replied Robert. “We’ll take a lawsuit, if we can just live.”
The man looked at him, mute.
That’s just the way, isn’t it? Protect the drunk; who cares about the innocent, upstanding, productive citizen.
Tuesday evening, we finally gave in and went to Wal-Mart, where we got a new monitor for $219.95. Our old one refused to display a decent picture no matter how we wiggled and jiggled and shook it and stuck books under one side and smacked it and kicked it and flung it on the floor. The new one sports a 25” screen, as opposed to the old one’s 19” screen.
Victoria had a rip-roaring time with the large box it came in, especially when Teddy put her in it, slowly turned the box over and over until the flaps were on the bottom, then spun her round and round and round, pushing it into another room as it rotated. Victoria laughed and laughed, and then when Teddy pulled the box straight up and left her sitting on the floor, amazingly enough in an entirely different room than she had thought she was in, she guffawed uproariously.
“I went spinning round and round right into another country, and I didn’t even know where I was!” she told me merrily.
We were out of bread that night, and I was out of energy to go to the store, but we did have some beleaguered bananas on the counter, and we had all the ingredients for banana bread, even walnuts. (I am of the opinion that banana bread is not really banana bread, without walnuts.) So, I made banana bread, adding applesauce just to make it a little bit better.
Wednesday afternoon it misted, and then it rained, and then it actually sleeted. And it was cold.
At church that evening, Robert preached from II Corinthians 5, the chapter Scofield has entitled, “Why death itself has no terrors for the servant of the Lord.” From this chapter, we understand how God gave to every man the desire to live; nevertheless we are not afraid to die, because we know that we will be given a new body that will never again die, and we will be present with the Lord. The Christian’s longing is that Christ would come before we die, and of course we believe that that could happen at any time; but whichever way it should happen, we know that some day we shall be with the Lord, and that is what we look forward to.
Thursday, Victoria and I went to the post office to mail some letters. The poor flustered man behind the counter didn’t notice that the first two I handed him were for other countries; then he thought they were both for Canada because he didn’t look at the second one; then he forgot that he’d weighed them at two ounces rather than one. I tried to help him with all that, but I couldn’t see his meter screen to see how much the postage was supposed to be, and I didn’t know the value of the stamps he was putting on; so I shan’t be surprised if the letters wind up back in my mailbox in a week or so. Furthermore, the stamps he added were the kind with adhesive on the back, and they don’t stick well to those calendar pages I use for envelopes. He stamped them for me, so maybe the letters will go, even if the stamps fall off. Anyway, if you happen to live in Canada or Argentina, please understand that a possible late letter is not my fault, I cannot be held responsible!
Let’s hope the person in line behind me asked for something simple, such as a book of $.34 stamps, and no more, from the poor little man.
Victoria and I then trotted off to Wal-Mart, where I purchased two dozen petunias in dark purple, variegated lavender, variegated fuchsia, and hot pink; three yellow Shasta daisies; three chrysanthemums, two bright and one pale yellow; five bright red impatiens, and nine pansies of all colors. I also purchased two 2-gallon watering cans, which pleased Victoria no end. She immediately trotted all over the greenhouse (we were the only ones there at the moment), pretending to plant and water flowers by the dozen. It was only 58°, a bit windy, and we were cold by the time we went to pay for the flowers.
Home again, I gathered together spade, gardening gloves, coffee mug (to warm me up), dandelion digger (to try to get the tenacious mulberry tree eradicated from my flower bed where I planned to plant the flowers), scissors (to cut apart the thin plastic containers the plants were in), and knee pad; and Victoria excitedly ran to fill the watering cans.
Planting all that took longer than I’d expected--two hours and 45 minutes. But with the afternoon sun shining on the bricks on the front of our house, it was warm and cozy planting flowers there. I first pulled out a few weeds and some old growth from last year. Tabby helpfully came along to pounce on every other handful I tossed down, alternately pouncing and then running in pretended fright from the next handful. Kitty strolled arrogantly through the vicinity, electing to curl up in the irises.
Once again, I haven’t gotten the irises thinned out. Every year, I want to do that, and put a line of irises along the back fence or somewhere; but I’m just not tough enough or heavy enough to get a shovel through all those rhizomes, try as I might. They are getting so crowded, they don’t flower well.
Hannah and Aaron came visiting just as I finished and was sweeping the porch and sidewalk. She showed us her video of the robin that has built a nest on their gutter. There are now four tiny baby birds in the nest, featherless and bare, and the parents spend the entire day feeding the hungry little beggars.
In emoting over a story I was telling Hannah, I clapped both hands against my cheeks and raised my eyebrows. Aaron immediately clapped a hand against one cheek and looked at me with eyebrows raised high.
A couple of days ago, Hannah and Aaron were here. I picked up the small stuffed kangaroo on which I’d sewn a ribbon rose, the better to cover a small rust stain it acquired once upon a time, and bounced it up and down toward Aaron.
“Hop, hop, hop,” I said, and tapped its nose on Aaron’s foot, making a loud snuffling noise. Then suddenly jerking it away, I exclaimed in a high-pitched tone, “Peeeeeewww!”
He giggled and held his foot up for more, and I obliged. The game could have gone on forever, I think, without Aaron tiring of it.
A couple of days later, Aaron was sitting on the loveseat, and I reached for that same little kangaroo and held it out to him. He didn’t take it, but started to grin and instead lifted his little bare foot, so that I might start up the Hop-Hop-Sniff-Sniff-Peeeeeew game again. Silly baby.
I started it up.
Now and then he took the kangaroo from me and examined the ribbon rose, but he quickly put the animal back into my hand, and up came a little foot.
I do believe I have taught him that, forevermore, the sole purpose of kangaroos on this earth is to hop up to one’s foot, snuffle it loudly, and proclaim, “Peeeew!!” and then take a mighty leap away.
Thursday evening, sorely missing my bicycle, Joseph and I went to get it at the Schwinn shop. They hadn’t even started on it. So, they fixed it while I waited...riding one of their nifty stationary bikes. According to the gauges, I burned ten calories while they worked on my bike. Calls for a KitKat or something, don’t you think?
Finally the bike was done, and we took it home. Joseph got it out of the Suburban for me, and I jumped on and went pedaling down the street as fast as I could go. Yep, it woiks, it woiks, it woiks! Yaaaaaaayyy!
I like Bike.
We visited Christine, David’s wife, for a few minutes that evening. Caleb and Michael, along with Victoria, were soon playing Pom-Pom-Pole-Away on the front lawn. When I left, I showed Christine a nest in her wreath on the front porch.
“Oh,” she said, “so that’s where that little egg came from,” pointing at the small mess on the porch.
Lynette, who is seven, looked at it. “What’s that egg for?” she asked, looking concerned.
Christine rolled her eyes, not wishing to reveal that a finch egg had been broken, thereby reducing the projected finch population by one. Lynette likes birds.
“Well, you see,” I explained helpfully, “the mother finch was fixing her family an egg omelet, but she missed the pan with that egg” (tapping my toe in the used-to-be-an-egg’s general direction) “and then she couldn’t find her squeegee, so--” I shrugged and grimaced.
Lynette bounced off to play, giggling.
Hannah called that night; she’d been out walking, and Tabby had followed her home. Victoria and I jumped into the Suburban and drove over to collect him home again. He was a little bit scared, and kept trying to back his way out of my arms, but not once did I feel a single claw. He’s a good-tempered cat; I really like him. I no sooner brought him into the house than he tripped hurriedly out the pet door, and I wondered if he would retrace his route straight back to Hannah’s house.
But soon there he was, curled up on the loveseat near me, carefully licking his little golden paws and washing the top of his head and behind his ears. Isn’t that cute, when cats do that? I guess if he went to Hannah’s house again, which I doubt, he found his way back home without difficulty.
Larry sometimes smells of form oil when he gets home from work. Form oil is used on the forms so that, first, the concrete flows through the walls better, and, second, so that the concrete doesn’t stick to the forms. Without form oil, the forms would be practically impossible to remove from the cement. But... PheewwwEEE, does that awful-smelling stuff make my head pound. And there sits Larry in his recliner right behind me, contaminating recliner and entire room alike. Ugh! (Ugh about the smell, not the husband. I keep them separate in my mind, you understand.) The problem is, he can’t usually take a shower right away when he gets home, because all the showers are in constant use from then until the children’s bedtime. The Columbus Water Municipality is supported mainly by the Jacksons of Forty-Second Avenue, I think.
Friday afternoon I went out to plant the roots I bought a week ago or so at Wal-Mart: seven lilies-of-the-valley, two hostas, and one bleeding heart. My big bleeding heart bushes, one pink and one white, along with the Virginia bluebells, died out, probably on account of getting choked with weeds the spring before Hannah’s wedding, when I was so busy sewing purple taffeta and putting ivory beads on the ivory lace of Victoria’s flowergirl dress that the weeds took a far back seat. The flowers might have made a feeble attempt to come back to life last year, but I did nothing in my gardens because I was cleaning the basement from Eastertime till Christmastime, and that’s no exaggeration.
The basement needs a cleaning again, although it’s not nearly as bad as it was last year; but since neither the rugrats nor the curtain climbers nor the domestic urchins seem to give a hoot, and they just mess it all back up again, I will work on my flowers and let their rooms go to wreck and ruin, this year. At least people will see all the trouble I go to, outside; and maybe the neighbors will appreciate it, at least.
I transplanted a dozen tulips from the north garden to the south side of the driveway; they don’t do well when the sun rarely touches them, and a couple of them are parrot tulips--much too pretty to leave where hardly anyone ever sees them. One is just ready to bloom; I hope I didn’t harm it, transplanting it right now. I also transplanted a few hollyhocks from the front of the south garden to the back, which is a more befitting locale for tall hollyhocks. Hollyhocks drop their seeds anywhere and everywhere, and invariably come up directly in front of shorter flowers. Another mulberry ‘tree’ is valiantly coming up again, despite the numerous times it has been whacked down. I don’t want a mulberry tree in my flower garden, can’t the dumb thing tell that?! The trouble is, it’s too big for me to dig up entirely; guess I’ll have to get Dgeorge on it, or de udter feller. (That’s an old German saying; a friend of mine has that little ‘proverb’ on a plaque on her kitchen wall: ‘Let Dgeorge do it’, etc.)
Next, I dug up all the dandelions (well, that is, it looked like I’d dug up all the dandelions; by the next day I would find out it was not all the dandelions) from the front and side lawns. I need to plant grass seed; some areas have no grass at all; I guess we left the mountain goats too long in one place. I dug up dandelions in the middle of my irises, also digging up some irises by accident. Doesn’t matter; they are much too crowded, anyway, and I have wanted to thin them out and plant some elsewhere for a long time. They don’t bloom as well when there are so many. I planted seven in the flower garden on the south; we shall see if they survive their unceremonious segmentation.
Joseph mowed down my clematis Thursday. It’s about the zillionth time the poor thing has been mowed. A 60-mph wind knocked my poor trellis down last year and broke it to smithereens, and it hasn’t been fixed yet, although Larry says it could be fixed. Go-carts and such things come first, though.
So, after saying that two hours and forty-five minutes was too long for me to be planting things yesterday, I wound up spending four hours planting flowers, transplanting flowers, and unplanting dandelions Friday. I was so stiff and sore that I staggered into the house, collapsed into a chair, and watched a film about the Ukraine without moving a muscle till it was done, which I am not sure helped my cause in the slightest. In fact, I believe it just may have made me stiffer yet.
Whew! I’ve become an old lady since the last time I planted flowers! (Or did I say that then, too?) I need more exercise!
Then Larry came home and asked if we wanted to go to Fremont to look at pop-up campers.
We did.
Hester didn’t come; she went with Teddy and Amy for a bike ride, which was fine with Hester, since her new bike was clamoring to go somewhere. Anywhere.
Also, it meant she got to evade my decree that neither she nor Lydia could ride their new bikes until they’d picked things up in their room so that Larry could lay their new tile. I wonder if she felt smug about that? And does Lydia think it highly unfair, hmm?
We arrived in Norfolk just after dark. A raccoon came out of the nearby woods to look at campers with us. We wandered about, looking at any that were unlocked by the light of Larry’s flashlight. The nice ones, of course, were out of our reach. I suspected that we would wind up with a fixer-up model, if any at all; and I suspected that we would soon wind up with some sort of a camper, because when Larry starts looking, he soon buys.
“Let us hope,” I said, “that we don’t buy something that costs so much we have no money left with which to take it somewhere!”
Larry laughed. I had not intended to be funny.
Finding several pop-ups of interest, we decided to come back the next day.
Dorcas called about noon Saturday to tell us that Thomas the Tank Engine was going to be at Fremont that day. I’d read the article in the paper, but hadn’t paid any attention to the date...
(I should have. It turned out, Thomas will not be in Fremont till next week.)
But first we were going to Norfolk to look at campers in the daylight.
They were very busy, and we spent a good while browsing about and drooling over impossibilities before the salesman finally came to help us.
Sure enough, we wound up with a fixer-upper. One side doesn’t go up; the cables are broken. They offered it for $850; Larry offered $600; they came down to $680. Sold! And they will sell Larry the cables with which to fix it. They talk like it’s the hardest job to do on this green earth, replacing cables; but Larry just smiles. Little do they know, he’s done jobs multitudes harder than that. We put $100 down; they will check the propane tank and connections (required by law), and we will pick it up a week from Monday.
During this time, the children tired of trailer shopping and got out the soccer ball and the Frisbees and skipped out into a nearby field to play. As they kicked the ball and ran hither and yon to catch it, a killdeer kept flying up from the ground, crying out, and doing her injured-wing routine. I cautioned the children that a nest must be close, but soon I decided I’d better hunt for that nest myself, if I didn’t want them to tread upon it or bounce the soccer ball right down on it.
I walked in the general direction from whence I’d seen the killdeer take flight, watching the ground carefully as I went. When I started through an area with small, round, colored stones, I slowed and took one cautious step at a time, especially since the killdeer seemed to be getting more agitated the farther I went.
And then I saw it: four small brown-and-white-speckled eggs, sitting in a tight circle as neatly as if they were in an egg carton, blending nearly perfectly into the surrounding pebbles. Just as I’d thought, it was right where the children had been running and playing, and it was a miracle that one of them had not put their foot right down splat on those eggs.
I called the children to come look at the nest. Their eyes grew big when they realized how close they’d been to it, and they immediately took their ball and their Frisbees far to the other side of the big field.
They promptly scared up a bunny.
Afraid there was a nest of baby bunnies in the vicinity, they took themselves to another corner of the meadow, where the only wildlife seemed to be the local cockleburs, which Caleb sat upon with efficient regularity.
After leaving Norfolk, we headed for Fremont to see Thomas the Tank Engine.
We stopped to get a large pizza, a bag of freshly-baked cookies, carrot cake, and some packages of crackers, and ate them as we drove.
It was during this ride that the littles started up The Tongue-twister Game, rattling off everything they could remember, such as, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pecks of pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?” and “Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t very fuzzy, was he?” and “She sells seashells by the seashore.” and “If a woodchuck would chuck wood, how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?” and various segments of Fox in Sox, such as the bottled beetle battle and the poodle in a muddled puddle, the details of which I cannot ever remember, which is a crying shame, as it is so terribly intellectually stimulating.
I then made the tactical error of telling them this one: “Rubber baby buggy bumper”, which has no rhyme nor reason--but then, none of those tongue-twisters do, do they?
From that moment to this, Caleb has been trying his best to say “rubber baby buggy bumper,” with very little success, to the riotous hilarity of his sisters, especially Victoria.
“Rubber baby bumpy bugger,” he attempted, making her screech with laughter.
Not one to be deterred just because he was the laughingstock of the moment, he tried again: “Rumpy baggy bambi bunker,” he enunciated, producing another clamor of merriment.
I pretended to be video taping a convenient center pivot for the sole purpose of getting all that goofiness on tape.
Ten miles this side of Fremont, I pulled the newspaper clipping from my purse to read the directions to Larry--and that’s when I noticed the projected date for Thomas’ visit: May 10-12.
“Who did you say told you Thomas would be here today?” queried Larry.
“Guess!” I replied, pulling a face.
He grinned. “That’s what I thought,” said he.
But that was okay; now we would get to do what I’d wanted to do ever since Larry told me about them: we could go see the Canada geese and their goslings at Fremont Lakes State Park.
And that’s exactly what we did.
And now, here is a part of a newspaper column by one David Grimes that I thought you might enjoy. It’s about instruction manuals, and this particular one gets his personal first-place prize:
If you are like me (and for your sake I hope you are not), you dread putting things together because you have to deal with an instruction manual.
This particular manual is entitled “Sliding Bicycle Operation Instruction.”
Apparently written by someone whose native tongue is Venusian, the manual is for what appears to be nothing more than a child’s scooter. The instructions, however, make it seem like you’re assembling the control panel for a nuclear reactor.
The instructions begin this way:
“Thank you for purchasing Sliding Bicycle. The product is made of special aluminum alloy with light weight and high quality. It’s shipment is convenient and it can attract the attention anywhere.”
(Yes, it will attract attention, because when you’ve finished assembling the Sliding Bicycle, you’ll have something that looks like a satellite dish that’s been run over by a car.)
“Attention: the design of appearance, the cover of illustrations and others will be different due to the change improvement of products.”
(In other words, all the diagrams are useless.)
“1. Open the lever A in the bottom of the handle pole and pull the handle pole to set it’s position, then fix it with regulation button.”
(Do not concern yourself with the continued misspelling of “its”. This will be the least of your problems.)
“DISCHARGE: 1) Discharge the product by the way of the opposite installation sequence.”
(Installation sequence...installation sequence...where does it say anything about the installation sequence?)
“NOTE! 1) Make sure all the levers have been shut off again and again before using it. Operate it on the loosen condition of the levers without confirmation can cause the handle pole bent and cause incident.”
(“Honey? Where’s the sledge hammer?”)
“3) Do not ride on dangerous places such as among the crowds, on the lift, sloping road, sliding road and steep slope etc.”
(I can’t my Sliding Bicycle operate the lift on? Why my money waste did I?)
“4) Be caution not to let children swallow the parts of the product.”
(Swallowing the instruction manual, however, is not only safe but encouraged.)
“DANGERS! 2) Do not ride the product when you are in poor health or bad spirit.”
(In other words, do not ride the product immediately after trying to decipher these instructions.)
“5) Be attention to the environment around, abide by the traditions and use it safely.”
(By the looks of this thing, I don’t think it’s going to last long enough to have traditions.)
And some wives still don’t understand why their husbands prefer to pay a few more dollars and get their barbecue grills pre-assembled.
What this proves is that, in the words of another columnist, while several billion people in this world speak English, the rest, it seems, try to.
By the way, I forgot to tell you: Joyce, Larry’s cousin’s daughter, was well enough to come to the wedding last Sunday night, and has been steadily improving.
Today Larry fixed French bread from Amana potato bread, and we had the fresh maple syrup given me by Celine McDonald. Jennifer and Sarah brought it, and I’d been looking forward to using it on Larry’s scrumptious French bread ever since. Mmmmm... that was good.
After dinner, we went for a ride. It was a bright, sunny day, and there was no indication that a big storm would come rolling in just a couple of hours later, complete with big hail and tornadoes. And wouldn’t you know, it hit at exactly the minute we were preparing to go out the door--me to Mama’s house, the rest of the family to church. The tornado sirens blared, and we heard on our scanner that a tornado was on the ground near Monroe, a little town to our west, heading our direction. Another came down near Humphrey, which is a small town north of Columbus. It began to hail marble-sized hail, and I imagined all my hard work on the flower gardens down the drain. Fortunately, it quit hailing soon, but not before breaking off Dorcas’ newly planted rose bush at Mama’s house.
The phone rang. It was Lura Kay, telling me not to come out in the deluge just yet, as all the people who were already at church and all those just arriving were heading for the church basement, and church would not begin until it was safe.
About ten minutes later the rain stopped and the dark clouds rolled off to the east, so I gathered my things together and went to my mother’s. Larry and the children went to church. They got there just as people were coming back upstairs from the basement. Church began fifteen minutes late.
I think I’ve done nothing more this week than wash clothes and plant flowers. For the last two weeks I’ve been planning to clean my messy room (mind you, most of the mess is not mine; therefore, it cannot possibly be my fault) and finish sewing that little pink dress. There are only about two more seams left, and it’s been perched under the sewing machine’s presser foot all this time, pining and languishing lamentably.
But I’ve just finished typing this journal from Tuesday--all eight pages and twenty-three lines of it (it’s unedited yet)--and there are clothes in the washing machine that I must put into the dryer...and it is 1:35 a.m. And tomorrow the video tapes from the library are due...and we have a new monitor. Therefore, I shall go make a fresh pot of coffee (let’s see: shall it be Tim Horton’s, Yuban, or Folger’s Decaffeinated?), start another load of clothes (there are a gazillion loads to do), and then I shall sit myself down and watch as many videos as I can before I fall asleep.
Tim Horton’s.
MMMMmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!!
(Later)
P.S.S.: In case you were wondering...I watched exactly half of a video about Kashmir. I now know all about silkworm farming, silk skein dying, and Oriental silk rug-making, and plan to start one tomorrow. (According to the film, it only takes a large family 4 ½ years to make a large, room-sized rug.) Wanna buy one? The going price is only $30,000.
Since it will take me about five years to make the rug all by myself (I intend to be fast), you will only need to pay $6,000 per year.
Splendid bargain, eh?
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