Lotta catchin’ up to do, even in a life as boring as mine. I hate to admit it, but the Revamp Frenzy that preceded Northwood’s visit has continued such that I’m scrubbing the algae and moss off the stair railings (there are about 50′ of them, ugh) and scrubbing the front deck, which I intended to do prior to said Visit but didn’t get done.

Grandma had a fall the other day—thank you so much, hospice, for booting her from the program, since the incidence of falls had plummeted while she was in your program, and now I suppose we’ll have to see that increase—and she looks pretty impressive. I’ll try to remember to take my camera over tomorrow to document it. Two black eyes! Looks like she was in a bad alley fight, and lost. Poor dear.

The Anti-rodent Initiative

Northwood and Snaotheus had asked for a List of Guy Chores That Needed Doing, so I made one. It had ten or twelve things on it, a couple of which would have been quite time consuming (not to mention exhausting). They got all but the two really big ones done—in just the morning!—including putting up the light fixtures that have been sitting in my closet for two years and steel-wooling the probable Rodent Entry Points.

Of course, nothing in my world can simply go as planned.

I’d prepped for stuffing steel wool into the gap around the stove vent that goes up through the ceiling, but Snaotheus found that what really needed stuffing was the gap at the ceiling, where the pipe goes through. He and Northwood pulled down the fascia that covers the pipe between the top of the kitchen cabinets and the ceiling, and he proceeded.

Northwood was putting up lights at the time, and they were both hollering, “Mom! I need (insert appropriate tool, electrical bit, or appliance of choice)!” At the same time, of course. “Mom! I need it today!” It was just like their childhoods.

Then, suddenly, came a loud, l-o-n-g wail.

“Mo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ommmmm!” Snaotheus, this time. “I really didn’t need to find your secret stash of condoms!”

I scuttled into the kitchen. “What? What did you say?”

“Your secret stash of condoms! This is horrible! I’m scarred for life!”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I insisted.

“Yeah, right,” he snided. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to keep them close by in case you need them quickly?!”

“Yuck!” I said. “They’re not mine!!”

Northwood joined us. “Ewww, Mom, that’s nasty! We don’t want to know about this!”

“Hey, at least she’s having safe sex,” Big Brudda countered.

Worse was, of course, yet to come. I gave Snaotheus latex gloves and the vacuum so he could clean out the mouse crap that was up there (gag me—who knew? Who would even guess?) and then he pulled them out. Four or five, in a strip, still in the sealed packets. I brought the trash can over and he dropped them in.

“These things expired in 2005, Mom,” he said. “You really ought to get some—oh, gross!” He nearly fell off the stepstool laughing. He lifted up another strip of condoms. All but one was sealed. . . and that one had been torn open, and its occupant was, well, not there. “I really, really, really did not need to know this!”

“They. Are. Not. Mine.” My teeth ground rather loudly.

“Well, if they aren’t yours (and I don’t believe you), they’ve been here since your house was built. So when you say they were fuckin’ around when they built your house, you really mean it!”

Despite the fact that these were not mine, I am quite confident I’ll never hear the end of this. Well, I guess I’m the one who taught them never to let truth get in the way of a good story. Sigh.

Ol’ Grandma an’ manly men

We saw the Auncient One for a while, and she was delighted beyond delight to see Northwood. I guess Snaotheus and I are old hat by now. I took them down to a new pub, McKay’s, which I quite liked because it was quiet, and it was such a joy to see Northwood drinking Good Beer. Yay! They had a really nifty 1950s-era pinball machine that was pretty entertaining, too. Very clunky and mechanical.

He stayed over and we went to Snaotheus and KrisDi’s the next day, where the two manly men spent a goodly amount of time fine-tuning Snaotheus’s trebuchet model. The giggling and whispering and brilliant ideas sounded the way they did at 10 or 12. Although there was certainly more cooperation, the primary difference was that they were using words like “mass” and “coefficient of friction” and “momentum.”

I do love my geek boys.

KrisDi was very smart and lay on the couch where she could be reasonably sure the launched missiles would miss her.

I noted that Snaotheus did not wear the Kevlar gloves I gave him to keep his essential digity bits attached to the rest of his corpus. On the other hand, KrisDi pointedly kept him away from, er, pointed objects. I’m sure Snaotheus will have photos of the UnThanksgiving food we ate, so I won’t dwell on that.

The big overhaul

The seriously major House Overhaul included some Never-before-seen, Completely Unprecedented Events, like throwing out the big box of orphan wires and two old computer corpses. I wound up with eight or ten bags of garbage in the garage, and I can only fit three or four at a time in the big Official Trash Bin. It’s going to take a few weeks to get all the trash hauled. And I still need to find somebody with a pickup who’ll let me load all the computer crap up and haul it up to that place up north where they take all the toxic junk in and. . . do, I dunno, whatever with it.

The craft room is once again usable, and even has enough room for someone to sleep in it, as Northwood proved. I have discovered that I can work at the sewing machine, turn around while seated (yay for swively chairs), and iron stuff on the ironing board, which is pretty cool. I’ve gotten five knitting-project bags made, to my own peculiar specifications, and four of them have a project in them. Don’t have any pickchers of most of ‘em, but nobody but me’s gonna think they’re very int’resting anyway.

The other stuff I’d intended to blather about was pretty pitiful and vastly uninteresting. I doubt that anyone finds the state of my Wretched Knees particularly interesting, and since it isn’t 223 degrees any longer my duels with the fans are over, probably for the year. Ye Dogge shedding like, um, like a shedding thing is just business as usual, and I don’t want to talk about the Serious House Problems that the boys (er, young men; er, what will I call ‘em when they’re 50?!?) noted, because just thinking about them makes my stomach hurt.

In which case, I’m just going to shut up now. Happy Labor Day weekend!

In other news. . . I got yet another dead mouse today. But it was dead, and not feebly struggling. I wish I knew where these damn things were coming from and why. At this rate, I’ll go through a lot of mousetraps and latex gloves, ’cause I’m not going to re-use those traps, nosirree bob.

I’ve had to cut back to my former exercise schedule—every other day—because of the extremely unhappy post-bumble tendons holding my kneecap to my quadriceps. Or vice versa. Since the recumbent bicycle puts more stress on the tendons than walking, I’ve just been doing a walk in the park, staying on the flatter ground, every other day or two, depending on what the knee will tolerate. Ice and heat, ice and heat, I swear that’s all I do anymore.

This means I’m walking over the same area twice so’s I don’t get into steeper ground. Which is, frankly, annoying. Even the dog gives me geez-are-we-gonna-do-this-again looks.

As if that weren’t enough, it’s been in the high 70s or higher the last week or so, so the humidity’s been quite high (stop laughing, Northwood, I know it’s not as bad as it is there). Therefore, my lungs function as if they were breathing in pea soup. Put that and the knees together, and it means I’m going about the same distance or less half as often and breathing six times as hard.

This is so unfair.

Plus, after Ye Former Rodent expired behind my walls, yet another little beast showed up, leaving tracks (read: mouse crap) all over my kitchen counter. Not even a day after I finished cleaning out the kitchen from the last one.

So I got mad. I went to the store. I bought mouse traps. I baited two of them and left them on the counter. Mice are said to love peanut butter.

After I went to bed, I heard the trap pop. Yay! I thought. Got ‘im! I heard a bit of rattling after that, but put it down to the well-known phenom of death twitches. Yeah, I know, gives me the willies, too.

Next morning, I got up, staggered out to the kitchen and prepared to dump the mouse-cum-trap into the trash.

But it wasn’t on the counter. What the heck? I thought. I looked around. No mouse. I turned around and looked on the floor.

There it was. Clear across the kitchen floor. I went over to look at it, and the mouse twitched.

I shrieked, the ewwwwwwww kind of shriek.

The trap had gotten the poor little thing by the nose, and the mouse had struggled itself and the trap off the counter and across the floor. He’d been in that awful pain for hours and hours. And no one was around to dispatch him but. . . me.

Gulp. C’mon, you guys know me; I rarely even kill spiders. This was worse than awful.

I picked the poor, feebly struggling thing—by the trap—and dropped it into a plastic bag. Then I picked up a hammer and smacked where its head ought to have been. It quit twitching. But it left me twitching. Ewwwwwww.

Naturally, I have deployed anti-rodent dances, banged on the walls and ceiling with sticks, put out poisons, laid venomous curses on it, threatened it, and served it with formal eviction papers. None of which was in the least efficacious. Probably, I should have given it Lydia Pinkham’s Medicinal Compound, which is guaranteed to be efficacious in every case.

Last week, I noticed that the trash had become a bit whiffy, so I took it out. The, erm, delicate, erm, aroma lingered, but I figured that was scented air particles floating about and that it would dissipate soon. Next day it seemed fine and I forgot about it.

Then it got hot. Really hot. And suddenly, Eau de Whiffeé returned. With a vengeance. Think nuclear retaliation and total annihilation of the earth.

And my trash can was empty of all but a few paper bits.

Fortunately, when it’s really hot, a person can keep the windows open all the time. I did so, and began the Investigation to End All Investigations. Eventually, I narrowed down the source to one particular area. . . of wall. Yes, wall.

While I am, on the one hand, thankful that Rodent finally decided to vacate my premises, I am, on the other hand. . . um, shall we say displeased? that it did so by dying in my freakin’ wall.

One reminds Gentle Readers that a similar event occurred a few years back with Grandma’s cat, although with a much more positive outcome. One hopes that Poe’s cask of amontillado had a better fate as well. And one wishes despair and agony on Rodent and all his or her descendants unto the nth generation. Gaaaaaaah.

• shutting all the windows and doors as early as possible in the a.m.
• closing off the south-facing bathroom door (this keeps all the radiant heat in the bathroom rather than creeping through the rest of the house)
• lowering curtains (where they exist) when the sun hits them
• opening windows when their side of the house is out of the sun and they’ve cooled off a tish (this means the north window stays open all the time, and when the deck is cooler in the p.m. opening the east-side windows, and the rest of them when it’s cool on the west side)
• opening all the windows when the sun has passed below my horizon
• leaving all the windows and doors open all night (I love my screen doors, best $1000 I ever invested), and
• running fans all night to bring in as much cool air as possible.

This works amazingly well. Usually, there are only a couple of hours in the eve., between about 6 and 8 p.m. Grandpa also taught me to take tepid, not hot or cool, showers when it’s hot because hot ones make you hotter, and cool ones cool off the surface of your skin and it takes your body a while to recoup and send heat out. In the meantime, you’re getting hotter on the inside.

So there! That’s my excitement for the last couple of days and probably through the weekend. And you must admire my dedication, since even so I worked out yesterday. At least, as much as my patellofemoral tendinitis would allow. I really hate this getting-old stuff. Every time you get close to a more-decent physical condition, some idiotic injury or something comes along and undoes it. A week sans exercise, and you’ve lost one he!! of a lot more conditioning than it’s fair to lose, and two he!!s of a lot more than you would have thirty years ago. Pah, feh and pfblthththttttt.

So toppling over about half a mile from the car yesterday, back in the woods, was not only painful and angrifying, it was unexpected and undeserved. Bloody damned unstable rocks! And it was dry, so not even slippery underfoot.

Fortunately, the knee bone did not snap, nor did ligaments, tendons or muscles rip, tear or explode, although they did stretch a bit. So yesterday and today have been transformed from Do Fun Things Days to Sit on the Couch with Ice Packs Days. Makes me really angry. I will have lovely bruises in a day or two and my wrist and arm are a bit sore. Somebody came along behind me pretty quickly, so if I had Done Damage, at least I wouldn’t've lain there dying for long.

The most interesting thing about this incident was Bluedog. Where she normally runs all over the place, checking back in with me every minute or so, she stayed very close to me all the way back to the car—no more than 15 feet away from me. You always hear about dogs doing things like that, but don’t expect to see it yourself. I didn’t get a chance to say, “Go get help, Lassie! Timmy’s fallen in the well!”, but I’m not complaining about that!

Spent last weekend with the Snaothii. I love hanging out with them. We looked for some patio furniture, but they didn’t find any to their taste; but mostly, we just hung out at the house. They tied me to the couch and forced me to watch the US/Ghana soccer game, but that was OK since KrisDi cooked macaroni and cheese with Beecher’s, and it was To Die For. We had yummy Indian food at The Best Indian Food Restaurant Ever. And then later, she and Snaotheus made chocolate-chip cookies. She makes them the size of a dinner plate. Grandma, who likes her cookies about the size of a quarter, would be quite shocked.

Speaking of, I scolded the poor dear yesterday. Though I had not been there for two whole days, it was my fault that she couldn’t find her lower teeth, and she just knew I’d thrown them in the trash when I swept everything off her desk and threw it away. Despite the fact that I have never, ever thrown anything away without checking to be sure it’s both unnecessary and at least five years old, she persists in believing otherwise. Of course, the teeth were wrapped up in another damn Kleenex and shoved into a corner on her dresser. . . right, one should note, where *she* left them. I try to be patient, but every now and then I just lose it. I get really tired of being accused of and yelled at for doing things I’ve never done.

She was fine this morning, though. The ear-clip earphone seems to be working better for her, though she still claims she can’t hear anything. . .  When you ask her quietly, from six feet away, “Grandma, can you hear me?” she replies, “No. This thing’s broken.”

So, bah. Time to change the ice pack.

I got recommendations from some other friends, notably for a used Yamaha 52, if it can be found. They don’t appear to be made any longer, so that might be a bit dicey.

Then I took my car in to get the oil changed prior to going to see the Snaothei this weekend. And lo and behold! there went what was my saxophone fund: $600 for the 45M tune-up plus new rear brakes. Damn.

Before settling on a tele, I ran across something called “Mujeres asesinas” (”killer women,” roughly). Not sure exactly what it is, but it appears to be a dramatization of women who’ve gone off their nut and whacked somebody. Lacks the kind of wildly overdone melodrama of the teles, fortunately, although it seems to have its own overacting issues. I’ll learn a whole new vocabulary—this time about murder and poison and such, rather than incest and rape and twins separated at birth. Hee hee.

Happy natal day to my adorable daughter-in-law!! (Yes, I called her, and I even have a present for her.)