First of all, I’d like to extend a hearty welcome to all the new readers from Facebook! It’s a first step to making this thing a bit more public, taking the pressure of the dedicated core of readers that I’ve been forcing to come here over the past few years.
My intention was to bring the blog out of the closet and then fill your week with a bunch of new entries. But I was stymied by two problems. The first problem was that Blue and Green did not have camp this week. So my days began like this:
6:33 a.m.
Green: Mommy, I’m bored
Me: Hrrhmh?
Green: There’s nothing to do at our house.
Me: i…need…coffee…before...i…can…talk…to…you
Green: Can we go snorkeling now?
Me: Hrrhmh?
Green: Where’s my bathing suit?
Me (growling): Honey, the sun isn’t up yet.
Blue: We could go build a giant helium-powered light apparatus that shoots bad guys and let’s us see underwater in the dark! Mommy, do we have a chainsaw?
Green: IT’S NOT FAIR. HE’S GETS TO BUILD THE GIANT HELIUM-POWERED LIGHT APPARATUS BEFORE I DO!!!!
Blue: (punches Green in stomach)
Green: My arm is broken! He hit me, and my arm is broken!
Me: I think he punched you in the stomach.
Green: You always take his side!
Needless to say, my lovely children didn’t help me get a lot of writing done this week. My other big challenge involved preparing for our upcoming family reunion vacation. It’s not the actual packing that’s the issue. I haven’t even begun that process. I don’t know if this happens to you (or if it’s my own particular brand of crazy), but in the days before any trip, I become obsessed with attending to obscure household details.
This time, it was the bathroom grout. Was it always that color? Shouldn’t it be white? I can’t explain why dirty grout would be a problem in an empty house, while it never bothers me when we’re actually in town. And so there I was, on my hands and knees with a scrub brush and bleach, and a myriad other bizarre cleaning tasks were already forming an unsteady pyramid in my mind. That shower curtain is looking a little funky – should I replace it? The rug in the boys’ bedroom is beginning to smell a little bit too much like boys – should I get carpet cleaner? Old Cliff Huxtable-esque sweaters are thrown in a haphazard heap on the closet floor – take to Goodwill? Stuff from my dissertation is still shoved in a cardboard box under my desk – is it time to organize.? Has the food in the emergency kit expired? Do we even have an emergency kit? Ack!!!
The Unnecessary Things to Do list was growing ever larger, and I was growing ever more anxious. And, still on my hands and knees, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been asked to referee a fight in a while. I hadn’t been asked to read a book or do a craft project or feed anyone junk food. I peered out of the bathroom and saw nothing. I strained to listen. There was quiet followed by the words “fuel” and “exploding” and “hee hee hee.” It suddenly became clear to me that my grout might be clean, but my unattended children were busy in the kitchen building a bomb.
I am in awe of creative people, especially when they say how they get their work done. You know, the author who writes her novel on the bus while commuting to work, or the painter who paints at 4 a.m. before the day starts. But after this week, I’m pretty sure that these people don’t have children or grout. I may not have entertained you very well this week, bloggers, but I did manage to save the neighborhood from 7-year-old terrorists. And I deserve something for that.
(Next time you come over to my house, check out the baseboards! Shiny!)
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9 comments:
So true-- without the UTtD list I would never go shopping for anything but food and diapers. Maybe we should just travel all the time to get stuff done.
I love the word "grout." I wish English had lots more earthy, gutsy nouns (that aren't swears, anyway). Oddly, my captcha word is "gromple," which is almost as satisfying a sound.
Wait. . .did you steal that grout from me? Because I decided that mine is also yucky and mold-addled and probably causing imminent health problems in the household. So I also got to work, with toothbrush and baking soda in hand. Not for long, though. Instead I tried to rid our entire dwelling of unnecessary paper scraps (otherwise known as good material for mummy-making, volcano-building, sword-wielding, almost 7 year old: WHO THREW THIS AWAY? WHY??? I NEED IT!).
Then I went back to my computer (after the laundry) and hacked out an ode.
P.S. I agree with P.Q.--grout is a great word.
A corollary explains why my apartment was never cleaner than when I was writing my dissertation.
I dunno about the cleanliness. Dissertation stank is a distinctive reek... in my field, you stop doing your job and start writing one momentous day. Well, morning... then Gilligan comes on....
One afternoon when I was writing my dissertation I noticed that an apple tree in my yard had a couple of dead branches. So naturally I got a box saw (i.e., wrong tool) and spent an hours or two lopping them off and carefully whittling away the little twigs. I then found a dry spot to cure for awhile. (of course this required re-arranging stuff to fit in two or three 10-foot long, well.. sticks. I had firmly resolved to make it into Useful Scientist's Furniture, perhaps a rolltop desk of some kind, using my newly credentialed ingenuity to prime the pump of creativity in the manual arts. (never mind that it would probably be Barbie sized given the amount of wood recovered.) Like a wizened Shaker I would plane down my lustrous hand-hewn boards into the finest planks, then fashion something grand using 2000 coats of lovingly applied handmade lacquer.
Four months later, I was living in The Hub of the Universe (cough) behind a McDonalds in a hovel with graffiti on the roof for $1450/month (a lot in those days). I was running experiments that took an hour to set up but had to be done in 60 manic seconds of flinging radioactivity hither and thither as fast as I could. I finished each exhausting day by chucking the hot junk in a rusty 55 gallon drum full of toxic scintillation fluid, and trudging through the summer swelter to the T. At the Park station (always 120° in summer, and chock full o' surly) I pondered a half dozen of the non-C trains as they moved at speeds that would embarrass glaciers through the station/oven before finally a C train deigned to arrive. After paintshakering out to Harvard St, if I was lucky, Traitor Joes would still be open. I'd select the least vile of their overpriced slimy vittles (usually peanut noodles, eech) and haul it home to wolf over our drippy kitchen sink while my married odious roomies (Mr and Mrs Beard) made smacky noises in their room.
I had had to abandon the apple sticks in the previous domicile (actually haul the things to the dump and fling). I wonder if the UTtD reflex was warning me off that equally silly lifestyle, and if I would have been better off being an overtrained Gepetto for a while.
I never took psychology -- I was too busy with actual science classes -- but there must be some high level analysis going on to drive the UTtD response.
Smacky noises. Yuck.
Yuck is right. But it's worse than that. She was a 'model' (just means skinny as far as I could tell) and he was quite interested in everything about that, particularly the garments involved.
A few years later a labmate ran into him in a certain kind of bar in The City of Brotherly Love; they had divorced, he was living a different life(style), and he -- at least -- was happier having completely switched teams. It seems bad and quaint, but I guess that still happens.
I am thinking you met the husband? Am I delusional? (Well, about that anyway.)
Perhaps woodworking is a common symptom. A had a good friend who, during disserting, carved a canoe out of a tree trunk in his basement.
I never did find out how the trunk got there.
The rate my last GS wrote up, he coulda grown a sugar maple between chapters 2 and 4.
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