A Path Not Taken...Because I Am A Melon Head.

So....

Twins.

They've mostly moved in tandem through their milestones,

from crawling to kindergarten,

and college was no exception.

In May The Boy flipped his tassel...

... and in June The Girl, weighed down with honor cords and medals, did too.

While The Boy's ceremony was a smooth (albeit sweaty) affair,

The Girl's did not go off without a hitch.

Unlike the dorm-dwelling, close-living Boy,

 The Girl need to be moved out of an apartment

and into storage 180 miles away from our house.

We arrived the day before the graduation to find that her soon-to-be-ex roommate,

an otherwise delightful, Star Trek-obsessed, cat-loving geek...

...had left behind the detritus of her near-hoarder lifestyle.

As The Girl and I shoveled  cleaned the place,

The Boy and The Sweet Man made trips to the storage locker.

Then...

they returned from the last haul to inform me that the passenger-side window

had evidently decided, "Eff this!" and had slid down into the door,

where it sulked and refused to come back up.

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Some back story: for the previous four weeks,

we had not had more than two  -- and sometimes only one --

of the three cars at our house running and available at a time.

The repair bills had been mounting at a horrifying rate.

Also, the window had already been repaired on the driver's side of my car,

so I knew the passenger's window would require a trip to the dealer 

and several hundred dollars to fix.

AND...

we were 180 miles away from the dealer...

The Girl didn't have a garage...

and the car was filled with The Girl's belongings.

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

But The Girl said we should at least try to call the local Honda dealer.

And while it was closing in ten minutes, the repair guy, a grease monkey with a halo, 

explained how this...

this...

and this...

...would be a temporary fix until I was back in my own zip code.

The Sweet Man and The Boy set off to Home Depot in one car,

 while I followed, sourly, in my Element.

We got to the street in front of Home Depot, 

but The Sweet Man, inexplicably, burned a u instead of turning into the parking lot. 

I followed, thinking he wanted to go into a different driveway,

but then saw he was driving past Home Depot.

I began making the "What the?" gesture to him...

...but kept going, because there must be a reason, right?

But once the car got on the freeway, I realized I was following the wrong car!

!!!

I am famous in my family for having no sense of direction,

but this is the first time I managed to get lost while following my own personal Sherpa. 

However, instead of becoming even more of a grumpy-pants, 

I began to laugh.

And laugh. 

And laugh so hard I was crying.

Every time I started to calm down,

 I thought of the Sweet Man and Boy scanning the parking lot, bewildered,

 and I laughed even harder.

Ten minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot and explained what had happened.

 Now, I know I will be teased about this 

until my kids are clutching my feeble, wrinkled hand for the last time...

 "Mom!  Don't follow the WRONG LIGHT!!"

... but it was worth it for the way it turned my mood around.

We gathered our supplies at Home Depot and as a team wrestled that window up.

After invoking one of the patron saints of this blog...

...the Sweet Man bent a wire, slipped it down into the door, and hooked the window.

The Boy grabbed the window when it poked out of the door,

and because the inner mechanism was frozen, I jittered the window button,

working it while hollering "Up!  Down!" like a demented coxswain.

Once up, we jammed in two door stops and duct-taped the top closed for good measure.

My heros!

The repair job held through the weekend,

The Girl graduated the next day...

...and the ceremony ended with

the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the releasing of white doves.

Why doves?

Because doves make you look like a bad-a**, that's why!

Joxer The Mighty, Part Two

Last month, I wrote about my dearly departed dog Joxer.

Losing him was especially hard on the Sweet Man

because although Joxer loved all of us,  he primarily was the Sweet Man's dog.

There wasn't much I could do 

except remind him that we really gave Joxer a good long doggy life,

but then on Pinterest I saw this:

IggyStarpup, from whom I had bought this adorable Totoro embroidery hoop...

... had a custom listing for pets.

In the listing, she suggested that they would make a nice memorial for pets who had gone.

Now I knew what I wanted to do for the Sweet Man.

For Joxer's clothes, the Boy suggested "street urchin," 

since Joxer had been a stray before he joined our home.

I sent IggyStarpup a photo of Joxer and this image as a clothes reference...

... and she got to work.

In less than a week, this arrived in the mail:

Isn't it wonderful?

The Sweet Man loved it,

and now Joxer is back in the office,

watching over the Sweet Man.

The (Not-So) Incredible Journey of Linguini The Tomato Hornworm

I was building a new raised bed by my Little Free Library...

...(which turned out very well, thankyouverymuch)...

... when THIS GUY suddenly appeared out of nowhere!

AUGH!!!!

Once I was done SCREAMING, I realized that 

a) this was a tomato hornworm,

and 

b) although a pest, they're actually quite pretty.

So I took the little guy into work.

The kids were fascinated, but none more than, uh, 

sedentary-challenged Mr. E.

I had recently started a punch-card reward/break system with Mr. E....

...(idea found on Pinterest, natch),

and he decided he'd like to spend his five minutes of reward time

playing with the newly christened "Linguini."

This turned out to be surprisingly effective;

the promise of five minutes' time playing with a cool-looking caterpillar

kept him on task better than anything else I've tried.

BUT...

I took Linguini home for the weekend, 

and put him on a tomato plant for a few light munches of fresh greens.

I went inside for just a sec to see which branches of a tomato plant were "suckers,"

and therefore good to feed to my pet hornworm,

but when I returned?

He

was 

GONE!


"Luinguiniiiiii!!!!" I called,

but sadly he did not return like some pup at the end of a Disney movie.

I'm not sure what I'm going to tell Mr. E.,

but I'm tying some yellow ribbons around my tomato plants...

...and I'm hoping this sign will help:

****   ***   ***

ETA:

Shameless promotion time!  I just added a new
Harry Potter receiving blanket to my Etsy store.  

Cool, huh?
It's a great addition to a Harry Potter nursery!

It's Here, It's Here, It's Heeeeere!

Woo!  Time for the unveiling!

In this and this post, I teased what I had been working on,

and now it's time to share it with the Wide, Wide World of Web!

....drumroll...

I give you, 

the Little Free Library!

Isn't it awesome?

I read about the Little Free Library movement in the LA Times last summer,

and vowed to make one for myself.

I love, love love sharing books,

and thought building my own box would be a piece of cake.

(Spoiler alert...

... it was NOT a piece of cake.)

My woodworking skills are rudimentary at best,

and mistakes were definitely made.

But after a month of Sundays,

it looked like I was finished.

EXCEPT...

ARGH!!!

Anything bigger than a paperback wouldn't fit!

So I went back to work, adding another story.

I learned a few things from the first go around, such as:

mark a channel, instead of a single line, for cutting,

so that the end results will be more accurate.

And, use one of those L-shaped thingies to keep things lined up

while attaching them together.

Also, pony up the freakin' $30 for a power screwdriver,

 instead of laboriously doing forty-eleven screws manually.

So after another month of Sundays,

 my fine Little Free Library was ready to take out to the sidewalk.

Do you see what I used for the roof?

CDs!

The idea literally came to me in a dream.

I originally was going to do the library in soft, ocean shades,

and shingle the roof with river rocks.

But once I got the painting done,

I realized that while the rocks may have worked with the Shaker-like simplicity

of the boxes offered on the Little Free Library site...

... my color choices were just too Afro-Circus

 for anything but an unconventional roof.

                          Afro! Circus! Afro!

                            Polka-dot, Polka-dot, Polka-dot! Afro!      

So if you're in Simi Valley, California, stop on by!

I'm on the map!

You'll be able to check out books

with a "no-shush" guarantee. 

Mother's Day!

I spent the day before Mother's Day with the Gabor sisters...

... and we decided to recreate an old photo.

Here's me and my sis at about, oh, two and three with my mom:

And here we are at, uh, a lot more than two and three:

(We realized we couldn't have my mom recreate her pose,

because then she would be staring at my boobs.)

Anyway... Happy Belated Mother's Day!