If you ever wondered what OCD looked like…

I’m so-oo over this.

Property Settlement Agreements. (Arachnoid Edition)

Have you ever encountered a spider in your home that made you want to sign over the mortgage to it and move immediately?

This one was close. I swear I turned around because I thought I heard footsteps, and there it was. It didn’t crawl. It didn’t skitter. Absolutely no scuttling. This behemoth sauntered like it owned the place (and nearly did).

I did like any normal person would do and practiced electron tunneling until I phased shifted about 20 feet away. This took approximately 0.000047 seconds. More impressively, I managed to recall the last decade of my life in perfect clarity, balance my checkbook mentally, and make a to-do list for the next 12 hours all at the same time without dropping my paintbrush. Time moves more slowly in the presence of 8-legged greatness it seems.

Fortuitously, I phased next to the refrigerator, so I was able to fix a drink (aka “liquid coping skills”) while drafting the title transfer in my head. After collecting myself, I approached the beast with a beverage offering. I’m pretty sure it was flossing the remains of the last homeowner out it’s teeth.

So I considered several more options: attempt to make conversation to see if it was friendly (the rearing of front appendages changed my mind pretty quickly), giving it a yellow pedicure (since I was still clutching the paintbrush), leaving immediately and not coming back for a few weeks (maybe it would finish painting for me, which would require me prying aforementioned brush out of my clenched fist), or taking a picture (before running from the house, of course).

I decided if I did try to take a picture and it grinned at me, I’d probably complete my psychotic break. So I settled on the other best alternative–shop vac. With the extension wand.

I’m now staring at the canister waiting for it to start rattling and jumping about. So far, so good. In a few weeks (when I’ve repressed the whole incident) I’ll put the bag in the trash. Or the whole shop vac.

Either way, I’m really just hoping it wasn’t advance reconnaissance.

The good, the bad, the tech support.

The Bad:
DSL modem dies a painful death due to undetermined causes.

The (also) Bad:
Tech support guy tries to get me to believe his name is Neil, when I know it’s really Haji. Finally explain that he can ditch his little troubleshooting algorithm and I’ll just tell him what I’ve tried to do to resolve the issues because I am not going to power the stupid thing off and on another 10 times. He also has a mild panic attack after asking me, “Are you running Windows XP or Vista?” and I reply, “No, my snow leopard ate them.”

The Good:
Modem warranty runs out tomorrow, ergo they have to replace it for free today. Muahahaha.

Ugh.

Rah Fscking Mah.

Better parenting through technology. Really.

Forget Deep Blue, or the Hubble, or the iPhone. I want to meet the design genius behind the alarm clock. Since the inception of the alarm, we’ve enjoy the immense benefits bestowed by the most-wonderful snooze button. [Consequently, I also want to speak with the linguistic brilliance behind the word snooze. Tired and groggy as I usually am, I always pause to look at the word and think, "is that spelled right?" And while you may be thinking, "Seriously, they've sold a gazillion of these, surely they would have correct a typo by now. Quit being neurotic." I'll have you know I wasn't nearly as bad until I received my Ford Explorer at work and now find the words "CHECK GAGE" [sic] every time I start the car. Once I find the gage, I will check it, but it’s apparently not in the owner’s manual. Things got even worse when G’s christmas robot turned out to have a heavily accented Chinese woman saying, “I have gret abillitee. Let me teach you how to dance. Ready…Shuut.”]

Regardless, the alarm clock is functional engineering at it’s finest. What other piece of modern technology can you throw an inanimate object in the general vicinity of and have it be silent for 9 minutes? Neither my children nor my telephone will do that. And while I used to think there was deep rooted physiological or psychology reasons for the 9 minute thing, I recently found myself bitterly disappointed when I found out the awful truth.

Who needs T.V. when there’s YouTube.

If you’ve ever spent time around small children, even the person with the deepest repository of useless knowledge will encounter a time when the inquisitive child asks a question and you just don’t know the answer. If you’re like me, you’ll probably invent some completely fantastical fairy tale to augment reality, then do a craptacular amount of research.

Eventually, said children will get wise to your game and will start to say, “No, seriously mom.” While they still like the fun fantasy stories [Really, I a saw the tree whittle a straw and drink the big puddle all gone in the 5 minutes we were inside. Really. And I'm just too tired to explain evaporation and the water cycle right now. I can do a pretty good 2nd grade electoral college demonstration, though. I'm just waiting for that one to come up.] they’re starting to want a little reality interjected from time to time. Geez.

I thought I’d have a little more time to convince my kids of the existence of fantasy worlds before they wised up. However, my 4-year-old got my number about a year ago, so now I have to come up with alternate methods of instruction and am readily willing to admit I just don’t know the answer, but I know how to look it up. [Boy, my participles are hanging out all over the place today. Oh, well.]

I was seriously stumped when we came across the line in a book that said (more or less) “The Kakapo lives in Australia. It flies very badly.” And that’s it.

Oh, c’mon people! You can’t end a book with a cliffhanger like that! We’re all left wondering about that poor bird and why it flies badly and what exactly does bad flying look like, really? I can only imitate a bird running into a window so many times before I finally got the dreaded, “No, seriously.”

Enter YouTube.

The Kakapo does indeed fly very badly. This is mostly because it strongly resembles a green schnauzer with wings. Actually, it doesn’t fly much at all and spends most of it’s time running around the underbrush. This also likely explains why it’s virtually extinct. (Only 92 left at last count.) G thinks it’s hilarious to watch.

We now turn to YouTube to see almost every critter we’re curious about. Flamingoes. [Which are pink because of their diet and whose legs move so strangely because what appears to be their knees are actually their ankle joint and they stand on their tiptoes. They are also very mean, and probably shouldn't have been elevated to the status of yard ornament.] Scorpions. [Who aren't any less creepy on the small screen.] Frogmouths. [Who do not, in fact, croak or even vaguely resemble frogs.] Bats. [Still the epitome of cool.] Whales. [Although avoid the Orca videos. They eat penguins.] Everything.

Who needs Brittanica, I have Google.

When YouTube won’t cut it, there’s is always the mighty Google to fill in the gaps for you.

I was reviewing my recent searches, and I’m fairly certain if some random stranger picked up my phone and was flipping through my history, they would think I am either severely A.D.D. or have a multiple personality disorder. Seriously.

“How does lightning make thunder?” “Why are sparklers so sparkly?” “Quantum geometrodynamics for dummies.” “Is Barbie part of an alien invasion?” “Internal combustion engine diagram.” “How do fossils make fuel?” “Where are they putting the sea turtles?”

“Why is the snooze only minutes long?”

That’s the one that crushed me. No psychology. No science. No human behavior studies. No sleep cycle REM physiology. The snooze is 9 minutes long because of a quirk of lazy engineering and an effort to keep early alarm clocks functional that has lingered on over the years.

Remember the old clocks with the little numbers that flipped over? Basically it was a roll of half-numbers on a wheel that clicked very loudly and obnoxiously every time the minutes and hours changed. Our primitive snooze developers needed an easy way to buy some time, so when you hit the snooze button [which if we follow general evolutionary trends, was tiny in comparison to modern counterparts] only took the minute wheel into account and therefore could only keep track of time in terms of revolutions of the wheel. If you hit snooze when the minute wheel displayed “1″, the snooze lever was deactivated when the gear revolved back around to “0″ again. Viola. 9 minutes. Just like your light timers at home that have the pins you move around to set on/off times.

Bummer, huh?

Augmenting fact with fun.

Driving down the road yesterday, we passed a new church with a full-sized satellite dish out front. So G asks me, “Mom, is that a satellite dish?” Impressed [because like all moms, I think my kids are super-geniuses.] I tell him that, yes, it is a satellite dish. Before I can launch into a discussion of satellites and information transmission and all that great pontification, he says:

“Is that how they talk to the aliens?”

Regardless of these little pearls of wisdom we’re picking up through out techno-travels. I still love the minds of my children and still have faith they will thrive as creative human beings. Because, yes, that is how they talk to the aliens, but we don’t need a satellite dish because the aliens have our telephone number and send messages through the toaster. You know, the one that makes toast pop-up.

Also on my google history: “how to write messages on toast.”

Live Burn Training. Part I.

Well, we’ve begun our trial run of soon-to-be Life On Our Own. So far, not too terribly bad. There are some definite high points, like getting to park in the garage when the sun is blazing hot; no one has to fry their backsides on 1277° leather (namely me). We can eat meals that consist mostly of vegetables (and fish for dinner tonight! Ha!) Laundry is easier to sort (pink…black…boxer briefs…) However, there are a few of those quirky little lessons I’m glad I am able to pick up now before it’s too late.

Lesson #1: Indulge curiosity, to a point.

Also known as “it probably wasn’t a good idea to demonstrate to G that his sister can conduct electricity”. [No children were harmed during this experiment, by the way.] While the whole endeavor was fairly innocuous [we were completing the circuit on a bath toy] the look on his face when I put a finger on one contact, his finger on the other contact, and then held hands with Shifty was slightly disturbing. I am extremely glad I am replacing all the outlets in the new house with tamper resistant versions.

Lesson #2: Truth hurts sometimes.

Whilst cleaning up the kitchen after lunch, I thought the kids were playing nicely in the adjacent room. G wanders in to flip through his catalog and ask for the billionth time “if the man is coming” and we’re having a nice chat about how UPS works when Shifty comes running into the room with a suspicious yellow substance all over her, a panicked look on her face, and really big eyes to exclaim:

“Mommy, I’m in big, big trouble.”

Pardon? So I calmly ask, “What for, dear?” To which she replies, “For a making a mess.”

Well, that explains the yellow substance. The questions are: 1) What exactly is that yellow stuff? and 2) Where exactly is that yellow stuff?

So I ask: “Where did you make a mess, punkin?”

At this point, she finally starts to look a little abashed and says, “In your room…”

For those who don’t know, let me digress for a moment. My room is already a big, big mess. Primarily because I not only have the standard bedroom furniture in there, but because there is a rather large desk, and office chair, and the entire contents of my storage unit squeezed in amongst the myriad of other things that are the remnants of my life. Typically, my room is very off-limits, and not because I’m neurotic about my personal space. [Ok, not JUST because I'm neurotic about personal space.] There is also a lot of things that are fragile, important papers that will someday be filed somewhere, expensive technology, and the downright dangerous [We remember the knife collection, right?]. My room is definitely forbidden territory.

Needless to say, Shifty can’t resist a challenge. The yellow stuff? Shea butter. Where? Well, everywhere, of course. Including, but not limited to: bed, sheets, pillows, carpet, chair, walls, desk, keyboard, bunny [G is NOT happy], clothes, papers, and child. That is on top of the assorted bowls and jars of miscellany she has dumped out. Thank god she couldn’t get the paints open.

While I’m standing there for a shocked moment [and admittedly a bit awed; impressive for 10 minutes' work, I must say.] She comes in with a towel and says, “Sorry, mommy. I’ll help clean up.”

George Washington’s parents had nothing on me. Chopping down a cherry tree would be a welcome reprieve.

Lesson #3: Never overestimate your storage capacity.

Part of our big job over the weekend was to go through all of the toys in the house and sort out which would go to Goodwill (for the boys and girls who don’t have toys) and which would go to Baby Cousins. Other than a penchant for attempting to donate each other’s toys for spite, it went remarkably well [No, G, we can't put Shifty's binky dog in that box. No, Shifty, we can't give G's train away.]

And we went through ALL the toys we could find. All of them. Did I mention all of them? Upstairs, downstairs, storage. Everywhere. ALL of them.

Holy crap. About halfway through I realized all of this stuff was going to have to move with us. We have no basement and a moderate amount of closets. Since I’m a diehard about kids not having toys in their rooms, that means all of this moves into general living quarters. All of them.

So the Goodwill box got a bit bigger. I’ve added extreme shelving to my plans for the living room closet, and I may have to sacrifice the dining room. Or give up the joy of parking in the garage. I’m a big fan of living lean, now I just have to figure out how to get my kids to grasp that concept. Wow.

All of them.

Ok, ok. I’m going.

Life is going to be interesting for us. While raising children is always an adventure, we seem to be an extraordinarily adventuresome lot.

Provided no one gets electrocuted, this should be fun.

The sign says 10 pm, dammit.

If you ever need some seriously excellent customer service at your local Lowes (aka Northeast DIY Temple), try rolling in with an empty cart about 9:45 on Wednesday night.

Either that or a really friendly zombie army in red vests have invaded the east end.

Next time, I’m going to walk in with a 2 page list, hand it to the first person I see, and sit on the customer service counter while it all magically appears in a shopping cart. Save me some speed walking, for sure.

Precognition and Paranoia.

As anyone who really knows me knows, I have some really strange dreams. And while I know you are probably saying to yourself, “Seriously, most people have strange dreams, you really should crank your self-importance down a few notches.” I would like to point out that my dreamworld is a twisted and bizarre place that borders on a seriously delusional complex and probably should get a DSM-V code of it’s very own. They are THAT strange. [Ok, and I'd like to point out that the very nature of blogging is fraught with self-important overtones, so there really is no need to mentally patronize me, I'm perfect aware.] But I digress.

Down the wormhole.

So the night before last I had one that made me wake up and ponder the true nature of matter, space, time, and quantum geometrodynamics and how they correlate to each other. Honestly, at this point in my life, my subconscious has to do some serious acrobatics to make me pause, but this one really did.

To give you the abridged version [because the dream isn't really the point of this post and I don't want to give anyone fluff material for my MIW] The Secret Service showed up at work to take me to an undisclosed location, presumably a “safe place”, and had somehow managed to get my children out of the childcare compound [the folks who could train Homeland security specialists] to stay with me at aforementioned sanctuary. It was later revealed to me that the government had access to time travel and had uncovered a plot to exterminate my entire family because, in approximately 10 years time, Shifty was going to save the planet.

All of you are probably mentally asking the same question I did, “Uh, you know she’s 2, right?” Why, yes, they were well aware of her age. However, as a part of a school science project, she apparently invented a way to engage in quantum-dimensional time shifting. [I seriously hope she got an A++ on that assignment.]

Well OF COURSE she did. In 7th grade. Makes perfect sense.

The best part is her reason for making this uber-project (complete with tri-fold posterboard display, I assume) was because her brother wanted to go back in time and meet their dad. She evidently decided she did not think it was a good idea to go meet their dad just like he was, because it would make everyone sad all over again. No matter how far back you go, he still dies. So she figured it would be a much better plan to meet their dad the next dimension over who was happy, well-adjusted, loved his family, and alive.

The science fair never saw her coming.

Now we start getting strange.

A few years ago, I had a dream that G found a way to cure cancer for his 5th grade science project because either me (or someone else near and dear) was dying of it and he decided he was going to put a stop to that immediately. And since he’s an efficient little guy, he figured he’d make this little hobby his project for the year, because who really wants to have to come up with two inspirational strokes of genius in one year.

So now we have G curing cancer and Shifty dimension shifting all before they’re teenagers. Man, I hope they don’t end up being one-hit-wonders and later in life develop an inferiority complex if they don’t manage to do anything else newsworthy. That would totally suck.

Either way, they’ll still have to clean their rooms and be in bed by 9.

Just when you thought it was ok to think again.

I mentioned this dream to some folks at lunch yesterday, but didn’t say anything else about it the rest of the day. Certainly not in front of the kids. [because I most assuredly don't want them to think that is what I expect of them in the next few years. Talk about getting an overachiever complex.] I was just going to let it fade into amusing memory and move on with my life.

However. This morning we’re sitting around eating breakfast and flipping through some catalogs. [G's new favorite  past-time and totally hilarious to watch.] When G says, “I wish I had a wand that would bring my daddy back, because I really want to meet him and I have a folder and a picture for him.” [No idea what the folder is about, but I'm sure we can all visualize the forlorn expression on his little face.]

Then Shifty says, “I can do that. We need a time tunnel.”

Ok, so if she ultimately makes a volcano for her 5th grade project, I will love it and praise her for her hard work. Although I’m not sure there won’t be a teeny little secret part of me that won’t be disappointed if it doesn’t shimmer in and out of dimensional reality, too.

Still stating the obviuus.

Back by popular demand. Ok, maybe not popular, but someone asked me why I haven’t said anything lately, and seeing as I don’t have a plethora of friends, one person does actually constitute popular in my world. So, as usual, you are required to humor me. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again–if you don’t like it, there are a bazillion other really interesting blogs [that likely have a lot more useful things to say] available for your perusal.

Taking neurosis to a whole new dysfunction.

Quick poll: Raise your hand if you have never been burned by the piece of red-hot wire leftover after a sparkler has burned out. Ok, now you people with your hands up–go sit in the corner and keep quiet. Besides, your mom is probably reading this to you anyway and will promptly edit out everything else I’m about to say.

Now the rest of you, do you remember how much fun the 4th of July used to be? Seriously, chasing people down with a flaming stick of potassium nitrate was one of the great joys of childhood. Not to mention seeing how many insects you could fry along the way. [After all, it is cicada season, conveniently enough.]

What exactly caused us to suck all the fun out of the holidays? Especially the only holiday with pyrotechnics! I understand you don’t really want a 4-year-old playing with bottle rockets, but where’s the fun of sitting at a “safe” distance just watching a couple of perfectly legal, Wal-Mart purchased canisters fizz for a few seconds? Seriously, the fireflies put on a better show.

The semantics of independence (perpetually non-PC is me).

And just in case no one else was bored enough to read the packaging of their mediocre fireworks, I would like to point out that every single one was made in China. Does anyone else find the irony in using chinese-made fireworks to celebrate the 4th of July? We trust the same people who put toxic chemicals in our children’s toys to make safe explosives? In case you’re not working yourself up into a righteous patriotic frenzy at this very moment, let me add a little kerosene to your stack of blackjacks–the wee flag my child was waving? Made in China.

So if we happen to cut commerce ties with China at some point in time, do you think we, as a nation, could still continue to function? Could you make it through the day without your sunglasses, or toothbrush, or coffee cup, or lighter, or happy meal toy, or iphone? [I had you up until iphone, didn't I? Might as well live in a cave without one, troglodyte.] Can we legitimately declare ourselves independent?

So if we are nationally co-dependent and overprotective of our foreign trading partners, it’s probably reasonable that our children are growing up over-sheltered and dependent as well, right? I, for one, miss the days of getting liquored up and tossing the whole box of cherry-bombs in the bonfire.

Just when I’m at the acme of my jaded tirade.

So whilst driving my sleepy family home, I’m going through this little ranting and raving in my head [and subsequently resolving to come back to the island]. I’m thinking of all the things I’d like to say to the powers-that-be and how truly outraged they would be if they saw things my way [also known as the care and feeding of the delusion monster].

As my brain is drafting the vitriolic post of my resurrection, I’m distractedly tucking my little G in bed and he says to me, “Mommy, this was a good day, wasn’t it?”

Of course it was, baby. Because politics and economics aside, I still got to spend the day with my family looking at the pretty lights.

But next year, we’re going to have sparklers, dammit.