4/26/12 – Thursday

This week on Dinosaurs Can’t Eat Pizza, Nance and I made Green Chili Enchilada Bake, and I made the best Banana Bread EVER.

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Longtime readers know my nephew Brian. In fact, you’ve kind of watched him grow up.

Well, Brian is now 20 – he’ll be 21 in August – and last Summer he and his girlfriend, the wonderful Emily, moved in together. They became engaged in the Fall. I don’t have many pics that include Emily (well, I think I have them SOMEWHERE, but I’ll be damned if I can find them!), so here’s one from Brian’s high school graduation. Aren’t they adorable?

On Tuesday, Brian and Emily (after 30 hours of labor) became parents to Alexander, who I’m confident you’ll agree is the most beautiful baby EVER.

My mother made that quilt for Alexander.

This not only makes me a Great-Aunt for the second time (my oldest nephew, Chris, and his girlfriend are the parents to Jordan, who just turned three; they live in Maryland), and my parents Great-Grandparents for a second time, but also makes my younger sister a GRANDMOTHER.

I cannot wait to meet Alexander in person!

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Last week, Fred took Friday off. We’ve been needing to go to the dump for ages now (there are certain things that the garbage men won’t take, so we let a pile build up and then make a trip to the dump every six months or so.) When we were halfway to the dump, Fred said “Our AAA membership is up to date, right?” and I said “Yeah, why?” and he said “The truck was hard to start this morning, I just want to be sure we’ll be okay.”

So we went to the dump and then decided to go by Walmart to check out their fruit trees. We need… oh hell, I don’t know what we need. Fred’s in charge of the fruit trees, and he seems to have a bit of a fruit-tree-hoarding situation going on. Which is fine for now when the trees are pretty small and not producing much fruit, but give me another couple of years and I will be swearing up a STORM about all the goddamn apples/ peaches/ plums/ cherries.

(Actually, those are all pretty easy to preserve, I’m not sure I’ll be swearing TOO much.)

Anyway, the fruit trees at Walmart didn’t meet whatever Fred’s preferences were, so we headed from there to KMart. We looked at the trees at KMart and then decided to head over to Lowe’s.

(Yes, we’d probably be better off going to a nursery, but they are so freakin’ expensive.)

Only the truck wouldn’t start. OF COURSE.

“Did you bring your phone?” I asked.

“No, why?” Fred said.

Well, I hadn’t brought MY phone with me, of course. I’d thought of it when we were walking out the door, but I was so sure that Fred must have his phone that I didn’t bother to go back in and get my (fully charged, sitting right there on my desk) phone.

Fred went into KMart to see if the people at the service desk would let him use the phone. I waited in the car and flipped through an old newspaper. He seemed to be in there a REALLY long time, and I was like “What the FUCK? Is he in there telling them how he likes cheese, just not on a salad, or what?”

Eventually he came out and said that AAA had told him it would be about 50 minutes before the tow truck would show up. We sat, we yawned, we trash-talked the truck.

The tow truck came, and he was nice enough to run us home after we dropped off the truck. It took the garage a day and a half to determine that the issue was with the battery. We were afraid we’d end up having to pay like a thousand bucks to fix the damn thing, but it cost less than $200, thank god.

Now I’d like to win the lottery so we can get a decent truck that we won’t have to worry will die every time we take it somewhere.

We spent the weekend getting the garden planted. It’s planted now, but nothing’s more than a few inches tall. I swore last year that I was only going to do one row of tomatoes this year, and by god I stuck to it! I will have plenty of cherry tomatoes, and I cannot WAIT to eat tomatoes this summer.

Fred planted twice as much corn this year as last, because we both love the hell out of corn. All of the corn I cut off the cob and froze has been eaten already, and we only have a few frozen ears of corn left.

I harvested the carrots that grew all Winter in my raised bed, and then harvested the cabbage that grew all Winter in another raised bed, and planted garlic chives in one raised bed, dill and cilantro in another raised bed, and transplanted lettuce and spinach into the last raised bed (catnip is growing in the last raised bed). Fred has so enjoyed the carrots that I harvested, that he’s actually talking about making long, narrow raised beds to plant carrots and cabbage in this Winter.

This year, like every year in the past, I’m thinking that we need to have a permanent asparagus bed. Probably we’ll just talk about it and never actually do anything about it.

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Saturday morning, I glanced out the window and saw Elwood running across the back yard with a dead mole in his mouth. (Stupid moles; don’t they know better than to enter a back yard stuffed to the brim with cats?) I ran for the back door in hopes that I could head him off before he brought the damn thing into the house. I reached the laundry room as he burst through the cat door, and I bellowed “NO!” at the top of my lungs. He immediately spun around and flew back through the door as I followed.

We have a couple of pieces of wood in the back yard propped up against each other – we call it “the tepee” – and Elwood ended up under there with his kill. I dithered about it for a few minutes, but he didn’t seem inclined to leave the tepee and bring the dead mole inside, so I decided to just leave him where he was, since he was already cleaning his mole in preparation for dining upon it.

For the next hour I checked on him frequently, and he was in the tepee (I didn’t look any closer than just glancing to see if he was still in there). The other cats hovered around the tepee, but none of them actually entered the abattoir.

Eventually, of course, I forgot about him, and I wandered upstairs to hang out with Emmy and the kittens. When I came back downstairs, Jake was laying under the dining room table looking smug and self-satisfied.

There in front of him was the back half of a dead mole.

(Do you like how I qualified that it was the back half of a DEAD mole? As if perhaps you might think that the back half of a LIVE mole would be laying there kicking?)

I called Fred inside and asked him to dispose of the half-mole, which he did (he put it in the pig bucket, and don’t EVEN give me that look. Pigs will eat anything, and better the half-mole go to feed them than lay moldering and stinky somewhere.)

Monday morning I got up and was doing my usual morning stuff (scooping litter boxes, opening blinds) when I found a dead mole (whole. A whole-mole.) laying on the rug by the front door.

You know, seriously, WHAT THE FUCK. I had to pick it up (I might have used the litter scoop), and I put it in the pig bucket.

(Again: don’t GIVE me that look, damnit.)

Since Monday, I’ve been a tiny bit skittish about the fact that we have about 300 cat toys that look VERY MUCH like dead moles. A hundred times I’ve been like “OH CHRIST, WHERE ARE THEY GETTING ALL THESE – oh. A toy.”

I think that all we need now is to have a madly squawking baby bird brought into the house and I’ll be able to declare that summer is HERE.

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PS: Someone asked if I ever found the half-dead Brown Recluse. I found him four days later when I was vacuuming the upstairs bathroom. He was hiding UNDER the litter box AND HE WAS STILL ALIVE (though barely). I’m pretty sure that I saw “bomb” on his list before he ate it so I couldn’t charge him with anything. I stomped on him and then sucked him up with the vacuum cleaner attachment. Then I emptied the vacuum cleaner directly into a small trash bag, put that trash bag into another, knotted it closed, and took it out to the big trash can.

I pity the fool who has to take Zombie Spider to the curb for the trash guys to pick up, ’cause it ain’t gonna be ME.

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Previously
2011: All that work for nothin’, damnit.
2010: Yesterday I told Shelly (whose husband found work after 10 months, yay!) that I’m trying to embrace my inner frugal bitch.
2009: No entry.
2008: An impromptu Saturday entry to share cool links with y’all.
2007: (What I wanted to say: YOUR MOTHER. Now go to bed!)
2006: So, in essence, the fucking DVR TATTLED on me.
2005: E’gar goes into the shop.
2004: I must be mumbling or something today. Everyone I’ve spoken to has looked at me like I’m speaking French and they can’t understand what the hell I’m saying.
2003: No entry.
2002: Blah blah blah.
2001: No entry.
2000: “Um… you mean, she lies on your butt to muffle your farts?” he ventured.