As you can see, I'm an organ donor. DeWitte is, too, which is a good thing. If he had to drive me around for a few more days, one of us was gonna end up dead.
And that's just what I've been doing, working hard. Well, not today, today I read because it was raining outside (and we had a bunch of tornadoes...unusual for this area. I'm really glad they didn't hit here but I feel so sorry for all those people that lost absolutely everything.)
So, I couldn't beat them. I tried to drown them, I tried to poison them, I tried to out them with foul smelling caster oil (You should have seen the look on the cashiers face when I bought two huge bottles of caster oil. It was priceless. She must think we've got a mean case of constipation.), I've made their lives as unpleasant as humanly possible and they still won't leave. I'm not talking about the bumpasses, either, I'm talking about all the damn voles.
They've eaten all but one of my Lily-of-the-Valley..that I got from DeWitte's parents garden before his Dad moved, the bastards, can't get those back. They've eaten all of the Hostas, Dahlias and most of the lily's. When I cleaned out my herb garden it looked like a piece of swiss cheese with all the holes they made. If I stood out there with a hammer, I'd have been delighted to play Wack-A-Vole with absolutely no guilt. At all. They haven't eaten the Canna Lily's, which they can have, I can't stand those things and I can't get rid of them, either....their welcome to eat all of those that they want.
Well, enough is enough. They can have the lawn but I'm taking back my gardens. I don't put in all that hard work (not to mention all that money on plants) to have them eaten like a mid-morning snack. I told Nathan to put his shoes on, I had a plan, and thirty minutes later we were walking out the door. How he can find any given Hot Wheel in moments flat but it takes him a half hour to find his shoes amazes me. I went to the hardware and got a big roll of chicken wire and came home and dug out the herb garden and the pergola garden all the way wide and 10 to 12 inches deep...that was a lot of digging but I had it done by the time DeWitte got home from work. Then I had him (I love him for more than his body and his brain, his brawns not to shabby, either) lay the beds with chicken wire and he helped me fill them back up.
Now I just have to do that to three more gardens and I'm done with all the digging. That should work, I hope that works, because at this point, I'm out of ideas.
Now it all started about two weeks ago on a Tuesday, on a Tuesday two weeks ago, DeWitte and I were driving down the street when he asked me where my license was. What is this, some kind of senility test? It's in my purse where it always is...Where's your license? Because two can play that game. He roots around in my purse and pulls it out. "Ha" he says "Your license is expired!" "What?!" I say, "Why'd you have to go and tell me that! Now if I get pulled over, I won't be able to say I didn't know it was expired. Thank you very much."
I wasn't very worried about it because I don't usually do anything wrong to get pulled over. I don't even get nervous when I see a cop behind me, unlike DeWitte, he gets so tense I think his testicles must retract into his body and he doesn't do anything wrong, either. I figured I'd get to it when I got to it.
Fast forward to this afternoon. For the last three day's I've been a planting fool. I've planted at least a hundred fifty dollars worth of plants but was that enough? Heck no! I managed to go through all my potting soil and all my shake and scratch Miracle-Gro and I wanted some hosta's for the bed under my pergola so it was off to Home Depot for a plant run, which is kind of like a beer run but for plants.
So I'm driving along, with windows down and the radio playing, singing along to beat the band, when all of the sudden I see a cop with his lights on in the rear view. I'm thinking he just needs to get around me so I pull into the right lane. He followed. My heart starts to pound a hundred miles an hour because I realized he means me. Me? Why me? I didn't do anything wrong!
I pulled into a gas station and the first thing I thought was "License and registration, please" like I see on all those cop shows.. The second thing I thought of was that I hadn't gotten my license renewed and the third thing I thought of was that my glove box had been randomly flying open so DeWitte all but super glued it shut and that's where my registration was. Oh crap, oh crap, I'm pulling at my glove box handle like a teenage boy that's just discovered hand cream while I watch the cop walk closer and closer to my car. I finally get it open but have no idea what a registration even looks like just as he gets to my window. "License and registration, please." he says. As I'm fumbling through the contents of my glove box and then the contents of my purse, he explains that he pulled me over because the tags on my license plates are expired....I didn't even know about that! I hand him my license and registration, just like in the movies but my hands are shaking so bad you'd think I had a bag of crack or something hidden in my car.
He goes back to his car while I sit and feel stunned and watch people in traffic stare and point until he came back. He tells me that my drivers license is expired, too..Thank God he didn't ask me if I already knew because I'm a lousy lier. He tells me he's going to just give me a warning, much to DeWitte's delight but I couldn't drive my car. I had to park it right there and get a "licensed driver" to pick it up for me.
Luckily I'd thrown my cell phone in my purse just before I left the house, which I never remember to do. I called DeWitte, lucky for me, he wasn't still out in the yard mowing it so he heard the phone and told him what happened. He said he'd be right there. Nathan was next door playing, he was filthy and didn't have his shoes on but luckily they said he could stay. And also lucky for me, Donna wasn't doing anything when DeWitte called her for a ride and they were able to come right away and save the day.
After they came and got me, we all headed to Home Depot for our loot. As we were standing in line to check out, this guy comes over with a cart of $22.95 Mandavillas and marks them down to $2.49 because they had too many. How lucky was that? I got three and Donna got one. I gave one to the Bumpasses for watching Nathan.
The only way the whole thing could have worked out better would be if I wasn't pulled over in the first place, but then I wouldn't have gotten such a great deal on those flowers. DeWitte thinks I used up all my karma points, including my bonus karma so I guess I'd better watch my back for a while until I build up some more.
I'll take care of my license on Monday.
We just got back from an art show. It wasn't an arts and craft show that sells things like aprons, crocheted tissue box cozies or upside down flower pot Dale, whatever that Nascar guys name is, wind chimes, in other words, stuff I can afford. No, it was an art, art show. In my part of the city, too.
Ever since they put that art gallery in, the cities been pumping money into our part of the city like crazy. Usually they reserve that kind of thing for parts of the city that already have money and leave us alone. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'm glad we're finally getting some attention but it's the spirit of the area I fell in love with in the first place and they're doing everything in their power to change that. Our area is probably the oldest in the city and we've got the architecture to prove it, but it's also probably the most diverse area in the city and that's what starting to change. I've always loved that it's not broken up by white areas and black areas and Mexican areas, it's all a big hodge podge of people. It's also a middle class, blue collar part of the city and even though DeWitte's white collar by trade, we're blue collar by nature to our core. But the yuppies are coming! The yuppies are coming!
This art show was in a park down the street. The first thing I noticed, besides the unbelievable prices and lack of wind chimes, was the lack of minorities and the amazing amount of high end fashion. Neither would you normally find around this neck of the woods. Even the African drum band was a bunch of white woman. Not just any woman, either, natural kind of woman. The kind that squat over antique quilts to have their babies and then breast feed them until they're 25. Think Carol King sitting on Joan Baez. It didn't feel like our part of the city or even a representation of it. The only part that did feel right was down by the paddle boats, that was free and the kids around here can afford free, they can't afford a $300 5x7 print, though. Their parents couldn't even afford that, they've got light bills to pay.
Well, I hope the city knows what it's doing. They might see the high end stores and high priced condo's they're getting ready to build as a good thing. And I don't mind a little more culture but I just hope they manage to do all that without losing our diversity because that's what makes people love it here to begin with.
Here are the rules:
1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4.
Don’t forget to leave them a comment on their blog and tell them
they’ve been tagged, and to come back and read your blog for the whole
story.
I had to think about these, I couldn't come up with 8 things about myself, so I'll tell you 8 things about our family.
You're tagged if you haven't been yet.
I can't believe how much I use that thing as a camera!
Lets start with food...
While these look really, really tasty...
This picture was on the front of the Randy McNally's Atlas for our area. It looked enough like mine that I had to contrast and compare.
I'd have gotten it for him but he does a good enough job on his own.
Show us a spice in your kitchen.
Submitted by homebody.
Just one? Sorry, that won't do.
This is the killer spice rack DeWitte made for me for my spice cabinet (yep, my new kitchens got so many cabinets, not only do I have one just for spices, DeWitte's got one just for his ibuprofen (two every two hours), vivarin and vitamins. He stops by that cabinet every time he's in the kitchen.)
You can get the canister things with magnets on the back at Bed Bath and Beyond for a couple bucks each. They hold about a jar of whatever spice you want to put in them. Then he got the metal sheet from the hardware store and attached it to the inside of the door and bam..I've got myself a groovy spice rack that saves a ton of room.
These are the poor unloved spices that didn't make it onto the rack..I feel sorry for them sometimes.
Notice that somebody didn't put the top back on the wasabi powder. I won't name names but if I did it would rhyme with BeWitte.
Then I've got these fresh herbs that I got at the farmers market last weekend. I put them near the herb garden and then promptly forgot all about them. I had to bring them in and soak them in the sink.
The rosemary, basil and thyme came back pretty good but I don't think the Italian parsley's gonna make it. Poor parsley.
