Pre - School Assignments

Remember back in the good old days when school didn't start until the first day of school?

Readings due by Tuesday (the first day of classes): three articles and one chapter of a book I hadn't ordered as of ten minutes ago (and that's just for one class--I haven't yet heard from the teacher of the other class).

Yes, I miss those good old days.

Ice

When I open my front door in the morning and look down, this is what I see:

Yes, that is my welcome mat frozen in neck-breaking ice. In fact, my whole front porch is covered in one solid sheet of ice, and it's not very thin ice, either:

The stairs are covered in ice:

Note the absence of any sort of hand rail or something for me to hold onto as I hobble up the slippery stairs.

The walkway to the stairs is also covered in ice:

Time to invest in either an ice pick or some ice melt, methinks.

The Sunday Afternoon Nap

They may as well have put it in the Gospel Principles manual. It's practically doctrine, isn't it?

Good night!

The Boxes in the Garage...

...are no longer in the garage. They have been expurgated to my front room... and my bedroom... and my kitchen (which is pretty much my whole house).

These are not just the boxes of kitchen gadgets and linens from when I moved home before my mission, either. These are ALL my boxes from my parents' garage, even the ones containing the relics (and I have a LOT of relics) from my childhood.

Methinks I see a major purging and trip to DI on the horizon.

Mouse

The good news: Anya caught her first mouse ever.

The bad news: It was in my bedroom.

More good: Anya is fed well enough that she did not feel the need to eat any part of the mouse (which gets gross, let me tell you).

I'm increasingly grateful for my childhood pet experiences, as I actually bred and raised hordes of mice (well over 100, maybe over 200--they had big litters of 8-13 mice each time, so they multiplied pretty quickly, and we had fun raising the cute tiny baby mice). Thus I don't freak out when I see a dead rodent, and I'm not too worried, because I haven't seen any other signs of mice around my house. Granted, I haven't been looking, but usually when I'm in a place with mice (I haven't been in many, but I have been in some, mostly cabins) I can hear them scurrying around at night and I see their droppings and things they've chewed, but I've experienced none of that so far, so maybe this was just a stray little girl who came in from the cold. Poor thing.

Besides that, my downstairs neighbors have 2 or 3 cats, and I have Anya, so if there are more mice, they'll hopefully get caught (but I'm still telling my landlord, don't worry).

My Money Talks

...and it says, "You spent HOW much on smashed coins at Disneyland?"

I will tell you:

• 17 smashed quarters at $1.25 each (one dollar for the smashing, plus the quarter to be smashed)
• 3 smashed dimes at 85¢ each (75¢ for the smashing, plus the dime to be smashed)
• 7 smashed nickels at 80¢ each (75¢ for the yadda yadda, you get the picture)
• 78 smashed pennies at 51¢ each (50¢ + 1¢)

= $67.18
(you guys can do the math to double check me if you want, because I did it mostly without a calculator).

The good thing about collecting smashed coins is that they are an inexpensive souvenir compared to everything else sold at Disneyland. The bad thing is that once I start collecting things, I like to have a well-developed collection. Besides that, buying the smashed coins never actually suffices as a souvenir; I usually get something else too, even if it's only one of the delicious chocolate-covered peanut butter graham cracker sandwiches. Okay, I guess food isn't actually a souvenir, but the point is that the spending never stops with just the coins.

All the same, it is kind of fun to have some sort of quest when I go to Disneyland. It's like a game, a very slow blackout game that I'll never get blackout on because they'll always keep changing the machines.

It's Disneyland. It's a diversion. What else can I say?

Smashing Pumpkins

One thing I detest about Fall is that so many poor pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns get kidnapped from their porches to be smashed unmercilessly* in the road. For some odd reason I have a particular affinity for pumpkins, so to see mangled and run-over pumpkin bits in the street makes me sorry for both the pumpkin and whoever owned the pumpkin. I should probably also admit that this shenanigan happened to me more than once as a little girl, so I know how traumatizing an experience it can be for a child.

This year I was given three pumpkins by a very generous friend who grows them herself. One is a sugar pumpkin, which I intend to bake and make into bread. The second pumpkin is about the size of a basketball, and then the last one is about the size of a large grapefruit, or maybe a small cantaloupe. Or at least it was.

The grapefruit/cantaloupe-sized pumpkin started to rot early for some reason, even though I hadn't carved it. Its skin was getting soft. I put both it and the bigger pumpkin out by my porch to be festive (you couldn't really tell from a distance that the smaller pumpkin was rotting). They sat there for a few weeks. Finally, I decided I needed to do something with my poor little rotting pumpkin.

You know how sometimes when you see a spot of mold on your cheese or your bread or some vegetables left in the fridge you just leave it there to see what the mold will look like as it grows? Well, I had this vague idea that it would be neat if I could watch my little pumpkin as it rotted. With that in mind, I removed it from the porch and put it on a small tree stump behind the garage. It's a very hidden stump, out of view of everyone except my downstairs neighbors, and then only if they go out their back door (which they never do).

Unfortunately, my downstairs neighbors had a party one night. It was quite a party. It involved all sorts of interesting chemicals and substances, and when I came home around 12:30am there were people wandering randomly around our yard, and even into our neighbor's backyard. It was… quite a party.

The next morning as I looked out my front window I saw a smear of orange in the road. My first thought was that it was a pumpkin, but it was way past Halloween, and my own pumpkin was still intact on my porch (I checked), so I figured the smear must be leaves. I didn't give it much more thought after that. As I left for work, however, I noticed that my little rotting pumpkin was not on the stump behind the garage, and the truth hit me: it was a pumpkin in the street, and it was my pumpkin.

Sigh.

I wonder what it is about my pumpkins that scream, "Take me! Throw me on the asphalt!" Maybe it was because it was soft and rotting. Maybe they figured it had been forgotten and they were helping me out. Maybe they were drunk.

Maybe I should stop leaving my pumpkins on the porch.

 

*Did you know that "merciless" and "unmerciless" mean the same thing? Weird, huh?

Hairy

I'd forgotten how hairy long hair is, how it sheds all over the place, clogs the drain in the shower, clogs the drain in the sink, leaves shining strands on shoulders of sweaters and coats…

I'm used to cat hair all over the place, but long hair—even when it's my own—is a different matter entirely.

Blech.