My house flooded, Part 3

  I'm getting to know spaces in my house that I've never seen before.

  Like under my living-room floor.

  And behind my stove.
  I'm also discovering that there are lots of tasty microwavable meals, like this Kashi brand Lemongrass Coconut Chicken.
  I'm learning some things about myself, too. For example, I apparently hoard boxes of new garbage bags. Thinking about it, I do have many moments in Target during which I wonder, "Do we need garbage bags? Bah, I don't know," as I throw a box in the cart.
  I apparently, too, am heir to a great fortune of sorts, if you count the things I own and have forgotten about. As we shuffle everything out of rooms that got wet, and make room for things that came from other rooms, I find things. A new utility knife. (I need one of those!) A candle that smells like cinnamon buns and carries a 50-cent Goodwill price tag on the back. (Nice!) More jars of homemade pickle relish than I ever remember canning. (Hmmm. Hope I put a date on those.)
  My kids watched "Oliver!" today, the latest in a line of musicals we're getting from netflicks. I'm going to add "The King and I" to the list because all day, I've had the song "Getting to Know You" stuck in my head.

My house flooded: Feng shui edition

  After moving my computer to a different room, organizing my former home office was on my to-do list for months. On June 29, I posted Office update: Final edition? The question mark was a good choice. Our burst pipe and subsequent water damage in my home has the room piled with stuff again.
  In that post, I mentioned feng shui as a joke, not being one who believes that crystals and mirrors actually change the energy flow in a house or will make me rich and beautiful. But after stepping back into the clutter zone, I'll admit that there is something to the idea.

  A big plastic doorway is affecting my feng shui. The cleaning company put it up so the air movers and dehumidifier can focus on the room that got wet. The plastic doorway has a zipper. I find myself going outside, around the house and in the downstairs door rather than learn how to use this zipper. To my way of thinking, that's the easier route.

  The air movers are affecting my feng shui. As they make noise, heat the air and raise my electricity bill, they also seem to be sucking my energy and sending it somewhere else.

  The couch, TV cabinet and large chairs have been shoved into one corner of the living room. This is affecting my feng shui. It seems like the room should tip like a canoe in which everyone leans to one side.
  The cats have spent a lot of time confined to the bathroom. They're giving it bad feng shui. It's a large room; they have everything they need in there. And yet, the room has a vibe, the vibe of creatures who are resentful, but act too aloof to admit that anything bothers them.
  The wikipedia page on feng shui is "currently protected from editing until disputes have been resolved." Funny, the entry on God has not managed to generate such controversy. If it weren't "protected," I could add my anecdotal evidence of aloof, resentful cat feng shui and its effects on the American bathroom.
  So I take back any feng shui jokes. There is an energy in this house, and it is being blocked by plastic doors, industrial cleaning equipment, and a lack of running water. I'm serious about this. I might even check out a library book about it or something.

My house flooded, Part 2

  It's worse than I thought.


  But not so bad as it could be, I must remember.

My house flooded, Part I

  I was going to write about seeing a funny children's show at the library today, but then our house flooded, and I suddenly had a new lead story.
  We have our own well, and the pipe that goes from our water tank inside the house to the other pipes popped off. Or broke. I don't know, but we mopped up, my husband reattached the pipe, and it happened again, spraying gallons and gallons more water onto the floor. Tomorrow, I need to call a professional.
  It's hard to remember what happened. I saw that the livingroom carpet was wet. I saw water about two inches deep cascading down the step from the kitchen. I walked into the utility room to see water spraying, seemingly everywhere. I turned off every red knob I could find. Water still sprayed.
  I called my husband. He told me to turn off the power, which would turn off the pump. I turned of the main switch as I was talking to him, and the phone cut off. I imagine that was dramatic from my husband's point of view. (I could have turned off just the pump switch, but who can read all the little labels at a time like that?)

  As I made the assumption that my husband was on his way home, for what else would happen after a conversation that begins, "The whole house is flooding!", the spraying gradually stopped, and the kids and I started mopping up. I moved furniture that was sitting in the wet carpet, and Cookie found an old party blower that had been under the TV cabinet.

  Her interest in helping quickly waned, but the other two were troopers. They continued to help until their dad came home (poor guy biked to work today).
  Gameboy soaked up water in the kitchen and Princess soaked up water in the utility room. She got pretty frustrated by how difficult the job was, how heavy the wet towels were, and how endless the water seemed to be.
  "Grrrrr," she exclaimed. "I'm going to write a book about this!"
  That's my girl.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

  Today I took my kids to an elementary school that has a free hot lunch program in the summer that is open to anyone who shows up and is younger than 18. It's their only experience with cafeteria food, where they learn how to carry their food on a tray and open little cartons of milk.
  Looking around the cafeteria, it appears to be filled with about one-quarter normal, low-income people from around the neighborhood who are taking advantage of a nice program, one-quarter child-care workers or foster parents and their wards, one-quarter meth addicts, and one-quarter homeschoolers. Many of us will go the the playground for awhile after lunch.

  Cookie ate about half of her food, then laid her head on the table and told me her stomach was full. At the playground, she ran to me, sat in my lap, laid her head on my shoulder and told me she was tired.
  After that lunch of high-salt, high-fat food, I wanted to get groceries at the co-op. As we drove there, Cookie said, "Mom, somefings wong wif me." I asked what she meant, and she said, "I'm sick."
  "Sick in your tummy, or sick in your head?" I asked.
  "Sick in mine tummy."
  "OK, we'll go straight home after we get our food," I told her.
  In the parking lot, she told me she wanted to stay in the car. I said it was too hot for that, and that we'd be quick. As I helped her out the side door of the minivan, I thought about my friend who wrote about her young child throwing up at the mall. (Scroll down to May 3.)
  I chuckled to myself as I realized that my daughter was saying the same kinds of things that her daughter had been saying. I foolishly disregarded the brief, nagging feeling as I smugly took her inside anyway.
  I had remembered to bring my own grocery bags for the first time in a long time, I got a cart, and we took one step through the door into the produce section.
  That's when she threw up on the floor. It was just a little blurp, and I ordered Gameboy: "Take her outside!" and told the service counter we needed a mop. Blurp! I looked behind me to see that she had thrown up again, and this time, more. I looked over to my son, who had a serious case of deer-in-headlights and was holding his own stomach as if to keep himself from throwing up.
  "Take her outside!" I yelled, loud enough to startle everyone in the store. They stopped, looked at us fearfully for just a moment, then saw it was just a frazzled mother trying to wrangle cats three kids, and went about their business. Gameboy realized then that I had been talking to him, and he took his little sister outside. I sent the other kid outside, too.
  I planted one foot on each side of the mess so no one would step in it. I apologized to people coming in and explained that my 3-year-old got sick. (Is kid vomit less gross? I hope so.)
  I looked out the door to see my three kids standing on the sidewalk directly in front of the entrance, Cookie still bowing her head down.
  "Take her to the flowers!" I yelled, indicating where would be a better place than the sidewalk to throw up.
  It took a minute for the store workers to find the mop bucket, but they cleaned it up cheerfully, for which I was grateful. A man told me he worked in children's theater for nine years, and that this was a nightly occurrence. The woman who mopped it up was hugely pregnant, for which I apologized again, that she would need to clean up after my kid.
  I got outside to see that Cookie had thrown up one more time, in the wood chips in the flower bed. A woman was tending to her, handing her a Kleenex, and probably wondering where her mother was. I thanked her, and another woman gave us some wet wipes. Cookie was feeling better, jumping around saying "Yuck, yuck, yuck!" loudly, as if it were funny.
  I brought her home, and she had me carry her inside. Now she's on the couch watching a movie.

  I think we will skip the free lunch for awhile and just play at the playground.


Postscript: Here's how Cookie described it to her dad when he got home from work: "Me have throw-up. Me see all dat stinky stuff."

Anniversary post starts cute, gets angry

  Today is my 13th wedding anniversary. I looked up the traditional gift for No. 13, and some website said it was "lace and lingerie." That seems a little one-sided, and not something even I, the girl in the relationship, would want.
  In general, boys have it easy because girls like flowers. It has taken 13 years of marriage for my husband to believe that I think of flowers as a real gift, something that I think is pretty, that makes the house pretty, that makes me feel like a girl. I'm sure he's thinking, "O-Kaaaay." But when he came home from work today, he had flowers. Just right, too, because they're the relatively inexpensive kind. Years ago, I finally convinced him that I like to get flowers, and on Valentine's Day, I think it was, he came home with an arrangement in a vase, and it cost $80! "Ohhhhh," I said, "Just get the flowers. I can put them in a vase myself!" (Maybe he didn't appreciate that at the time, but now, he knows.)

  I found a good place for them, right next to the Elmer's glue and Incredible Hulk toys on the dinner table. And a craft made from an old toilet-paper tube.

  But what to get him? I took the kids shopping. If he were shopping for himself, would he be going to gourmet kitchen supply outlets, clothiers or even sporting-goods stores? No! He'd be going to the electronics store to get a toy. And that's what we did.
  I wrote once, and then again about getting Guitar Hero III on Mothers' Day. Our whole family has been enjoying it, so when we went shopping today, we got a second controller for the game, and the Aerosmith version of Guitar Hero. Now we can battle each other play together.

  That's romantic, right?
  Marriages probably last longer when you're not bankrupt, so I called my husband at work to warn him that I bought him a present that was kind of expensive. I said it could be for both of us. But the flowers are all mine.

  And so is he. He's a handsome man, but he never fails to make a weird face when I take his picture. His expression seems to ask, "Why are you taking my picture?"
  I have had women tell me that my husband is good-looking, and it's not something I accept graciously. It has been said nicely from time to time, but usually, it sounds kind of creepy. I want to say, "Well, he's already married — to me!" or "Not nearly as good-looking as me." or "Duh!" or "So?" or "Yeah. Um, I don't like it when people say that to me. If you want to pay him a compliment, why don't you go tell him?"
  OK, maybe I never said that last one, but I was thinking it.
  My jealously might have started 13 years ago, the day I got married, when many of my relatives met him for the first time. A couple women told me that he was handsome, as if they were surprised for me, and none of them said I looked pretty. On my wedding day! Hello? I'm the bride!
  My sister's college roommate met him and later declared, "Maybe there's hope for me!" Again, creepy. And I'm not sure what that even means.
  So today, my anniversary, I take a moment to expose insecurities about my appearance, discuss my day's shopping, specify that it's OK to spend $13 on flowers, but not $80, and warn you that I don't think "Ooo, he's cute!" is a compliment to me.

Nice day for a parade

  We found a seat near the start of the Fourth of July parade route, which I discovered is good for the candy haul. People haven't started rationing yet, so they throw handfuls of candy to the kids. There wasn't even much competition around us. I weighed my bag when we got home: ten pounds. I'm going to have to sneak some of this out of the house and take it to work. Those people will eat anything.


  I like the bagpipe players. They're so loud and eerie. This year's parade had two groups of them. As I watched, I seemed to recall that bagpipes were used in wartime, and sure enough, there was a documentary, "Instrument of War," made about them. (Always the distracted blogger, I just added Part 1 to my netflicks list.)

  We took our booty home and ate candy until it was late enough to go to the fireworks. When the kids were babies, I'd take a picture of them every Fourth of July. A nice summer day is a good time for a portrait. The pictures used to be more formal, but at least I remembered to take one this year.

  We dressed in glow-in-the-dark bracelets to go to the fireworks. A tube of 15 of these bracelets cost $1 at Michael's craft store. A low price like that gets me worried about the poor people working in the glow-in-the-dark factory in China, but I bought them anyway. Two people stopped us to ask where we bought them. I should have sold them the ones I was wearing.
  My husband and I have tried several locations around town to watch the fireworks, and been disappointed several times. Just because there is a big group of people gathered doesn't mean you'll be able to see the fireworks from that location. One year, before we had kids, we went the the end of a driving range, where you'd think you'd get a great view. When the fireworks started, it was immediately obvious that a hill was in the way. Hundreds of people quickly evacuated to other locations.
  When I was hugely pregnant with my third child, we went to a church parking lot, where only the the top half of the display could be seen. We didn't say anything to the kids, and pretended that things were just fine. I was pregnant; my husband had a broken collar bone. We were in no shape to quickly leave.
  For the past three years, we have gone to the very crowded main viewing area where there's a big festival all day. The fireworks are great, but the crowd can be iffy; it can be at the parade, too, for that matter. Sometimes I feel like the queen, who has come out of her castle to walk the streets with The People. (Yes, I'm just that conceited.) I'll tell the kids beforehand, "If there's someone dangling a cigarette by your head, or swearing, or throwing firecrackers at each other, we're going to quickly and quietly move. Don't ask 'What are you doing, Mom?' really loudly." It was after a Memorial Day parade one year that I had to explain to them what it means for someone to be drunk.

  These things have happened before, but not this year. The People were charming, even the kid who hit me with a Frisbee. When a guy dressed as Elvis stepped out of his car, my skeptical Princess asked me, "Mom, is that the real Elvis?"
  "Yes, of course," I replied.
  She looked at me, unbelieving, and then looked at the man sitting next to us, who had been listening.
  "That's him," he said, and Princess laughed.

Thinking about chickens

  Nothing says "political movement" like a table full of informational handouts and a couple of homemade scrapbooks. If the political movement is about keeping chickens within the city limits, then a carton of colorful eggs is a must, too.

  I have a friend who keeps about 25 chickens just outside the city limits, and she is involved in a group that is trying to get the city to clarify what the rules are. The ordinance is unclear, and people who keep chickens in the city are doing so without any clear guidelines. How many chickens can you have? How far away must the coop be from the property line? Building a coop and buying chickens is a big investment, so it would be a shame to be told later that the whole thing had to be removed.

  My friend had an open house to help educate people about the issue and to show people some examples of how to keep chickens. A chicken party, she called it. I went to see some friends, and so the kids could play together. And Cookie really loves the chickens.

  I told my husband where we'd be when he got home from work. "Are we getting chickens now?" he asked. Was that an opening? Should we get chickens? His question put me in a different frame of mind as we went to the chicken party.

  We saw several examples of coops. There were two big ones, which had roosts, nesting boxes and space for the chickens to run around.

  There was a little portable cage for baby chickens. As you move it around the yard, the chickens eat the grass and fertilize the yard.

  There was a straw bale coop, not quite finished. I don't see this working for us, considering all the animals we have living in the woods around our house.
  Thinking about chickens is fun, but I have several concerns. 1. We do live in the city limits, so we'd be among those flying under the radar when it comes to the city ordinance. 2. It would be an extra expense, although we'd have eggs to eat, there's no way it would pay for a coop and feed. 3. Predators might eat the chickens, traumatizing the children. 4. I might soon tire of the charm, and be stuck with the work.
  Maybe visiting my friend's chickens is enough.