The Thing That Lives in Our Chimney

Note:  Please excuse the abundance of the word "thingy" in this post, and feel free to replace it in your own mind with the proper term.  My vocabulary of plumbing/ventilation/construction-related items is abysmal.


When Derek was installing our (beautiful, glorious, spectacular) new hot water heater recently, he had to pry off a metal thingy that was covering a hole in the old chimney that goes from the roof, through the center of our house, and on down to the basement.  This was because he had to connect this silver tube thingy from the top of the water heater to that hole in the chimney for... ventilation?  I do know we majorly sweated over whether there was the proper amount of rise- I think it was a quarter inch per foot of tubing- from the water heater to this ventilation(?) hole; our new water heater is much taller than the old one, and for a while there was some question as to whether we were going to be able to make this work.  Derek's dad threw around fun words like "carbon monoxide poisoning" just to make sure we grasped how important this whole proper ventilation thing was.


After Derek opened up that hole in the chimney but before he attached the new tube thingy, we took a moment to peer into the hole.  I suggested a picture be taken, but that Derek be the one to stick his hand in there to do so.  There was absolutely no question whatsoever that if I were to attempt the picture taking, I would have somehow dropped my phone in the chimney, never to be retrieved.

Picture my phone at the bottom of that chimney, wailing and gnashing of teeth from Derek, and yours truly sputtering, "What- But- I don't- How- I WAS HOLDING ON TO IT!"


So, yeah.  Derek took the pictures.

He first took the previous one, looking down, then the next pic, looking up.  Hello, 117-year-old chimney!  Hello, daylight!

When I looked at this photo later, though... what the heck?  What is that?  That thing?

Bird's nest?  Wasp's nest?  Alien cell waiting for the signal from the mother ship to activate and whir into action?

Clearly it could be any of those three things, but a word to the wise, friends:  do not google "nest in chimney."  Most of the results are fairly benign, but a few will serve to further your belief that Australia is not, in fact, fit for human habitation.  Just trust me on this.

The Fire of a Thousand Suns

It's that time of year again.  The time when I rage and vent my spleen and call down (metaphorical) hellfire on those creatures of darkness.

"First he ate some lettuces and some French beans; and then he ate some radishes, and then he did not pass Go and he did not collect $200 but went straight to Purgatory for breaking the eighth commandment with such dark glee."  -The Edited Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter and K.C.

Listen, I know rabbits have to eat.  I do.  And I have a whole yard full of clover for them to munch on to their hearts' content, because try as I might, I just cannot make myself care about grass.  Sure, I like to mow, but I'm just as happy cutting clover as I am cutting Kentucky Bluegrass or whatever the greener stuff is they grow on the other side.  What I do care about are my flower beds.  Guess who's been spending time in my flower beds?

Change his fur to grayish brown and that skull to the remains of my tulips, and you have my flower beds as of about a week ago.  As any knight knows, swords and chain mail are useless against such beasts, so I turn to the only weapon in my arsenal.

Three years ago Cassi told me about this stuff.  I'm still crazy grateful.

I sprayed this around the bitten-down stubs of my tulip foliage last week, hurrying because Derek and I were about to scurry out for a date.  When we got in the car, I wondered, "What is that smell?"  I was unable to locate the source of the stench until I scratched my nose and realized that Oh.  The smell is me.  I'd gotten some Liquid Fence on my gloves and therefore smelled like death.  We had to run back home anyway, so I switched out my gloves, as I didn't think the scent of blood and rotten eggs would mix well with barbecue.  

I also received this hate mail last week, because rabbits won't stop until they've achieved world domination.  I half expected to see cut out letters pasted on there under the photo, but they're much too canny for that.  "Easter bunny."  Sure.  He probably also has some candy in the back of his van.  Just 'hop' on in to pick some out, little girl.

When I haven't been waving my spade and shouting amorphous threats at the furry inhabitants of our yard (oh, and we have new neighbors who I'm pretty sure witnessed some of this.  Remind me to tell you the story of how they probably think I'm a monster because I wouldn't help Adelaide out of the tree she was stuck in.), I've been enjoying the warm weather by cleaning out and weeding the flower beds.  I've got around half of them done, and it's not even the middle of March!  Thanks, sixty-degree days!  I've even got a big chunk of the toughest bed done, and I've only found two nails so far.  

Right side:  Creeping Charlie, grass, iris rhizomes, and nails.  Left side:  Iris rhizomes only!

A few more years, and it's possible I'll have cleaned all the metal out of the dirt in our yard.  No telling how long it'll take me to dig out all the bricks inexplicably buried under the grass, though.  

Bold Jumping Spiders and Bold Jumping Mothers

A couple days ago, Adelaide and I were the only ones home, and we spotted one of those small, thick-limbed black spiders creeping along the kitchen ceiling.

Ooooh.  I just did a little google search on the above vague spider description, and have spent the last 30 seconds looking at spider photos to try and identify it.  My guess is the Bold Jumping Spider (I did not make that name up, but I am thankful for my pre-squish ignorance, as there would have been significantly more squealing otherwise), but couldn't make it past the first search page as I felt too nauseated.

Even without knowing it was a BOLD JUMPING SPIDER (shuuuuudder), there was a little squealing because it was Adelaide and it was me and the smashed spider corpse descended threateningly on its thread after I had snuffed out its life force.

I managed to clean it up and throw it away with little fanfare and without doing that thing that where you pretend the dead bug or spider is still alive and advance quickly toward the cringing person next to you the way Derek always does, because I am not a monster.

Yesterday, however, there was another slightly larger spider of the same kind (you know, just a little spider whose very name says that it is BOLD and WILL JUMP ON YOU), this time on the living room ceiling.  Same thing, except it was just me and Caedmon in the house: Shoe, squeal, squish, shudder.

Right before I squished its filthy guts out, however, I whispered, "Sorry about your wife," because that it what I say before I commit arachnid homicide.  In my mind, I had killed Mrs. Bold Jumping Spider the day before, and now Mr. Bold Jumping Spider is just walking around, wondering where the heck Tina is, when along comes yours truly to make it a double homicide.

Objects may be closer than they appear *retch*

Then I looked up and saw Caedmon watching me, eyebrows up, smiling bemusedly as I whisper to the spider on the ceiling, which of course he was, because #1: Privacy is apparently against my kids' religion, and #2: If I am doing something even the tiniest bit strange, my kids will find a way to be there, because they like nothing better than to announce the things I do in the comfort of our home to the world at large- see #1.  I can only assume this penchant for mortifying me is a trait inherited from my mother; obviously a gene that skips a generation (because surely I never embarrassed my mother or my children, ahahaha!).  I began to glimpse shiny little glimmers of this realization when Adelaide was almost two years old and an inconveniently early talker, which was cute right up until we were in a public bathroom stall and she announced, "WHY IS THAT LADY MAKING THOSE SOUNDS?" and "I CAN SEE SOMEONE'S TOES!  LOOK, MOMMY, TOES!  REALLY DIRTY TOES!" and "GOODNESS GRACIOUS SAKES ALIVE, WHAT IS THAT SMELL?"  'Goodness gracious sakes alive' being her cry of choice at that age.

While she was making all these lovely proclamations at the top of her little voice, I was thinking that I surely hadn't been this embarrassed since my mom gave a very matter-of-fact and loooong talk about sex and its many colorful facets to me and 200 of my closest friends in seventh grade.  At school.  With no warning- probably because she worried I'd make like a squirrel and dart into oncoming traffic rather than sit there and listen to my mom unfurl her fancy school nurse visual aides because she is an over-achiever, which is great in 4-H, not great when you're praying to go deaf so you don't have to hear your mother say that word again in front of half the school.

What's that?  I've talked about this before?  Not to worry, I'll only be bringing it up for the rest of my natural life, because some things you just don't get over.

You know what I haven't mentioned before?  My mom dressing up as SNL character Mary Katherine Gallagher and once again humiliating me in front of a few hundred of my fellow high school students.  I had repressed that little gem right up until supper last night when Adelaide stage-whispered, "Superstar!" and my body went into an automatic fight-or-flight mode.

She did it with exactly this much panache, too.

My mother is not shy.  Unfortunately neither are two out of our three children, and even the quiet one is not to be trusted.  I suppose this means I need to refine my ability to embarrass others, just out of a sense of desperate self-preservation.  Good luck, children mine, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

Ruuuuun!

Near our house, crouched in a tree, is a large insect nest.

It's been there for months.  I spent weeks mistaking it for a piece litter, believing it to be a plastic grocery sack tangled in the winter branches of the tree.  Then a friend mentioned that she couldn't figure out why the City hadn't done something about that massive beehive, it was in a park, wasn't it, and right next to a school bus stop.

Since then I've ventured right up to the trunk several times, inspecting the hive, as if I'll be able to tell anything by a closer look.  Here is what my expert hive/nest observation skills have netted thus far:

• It's really big.
• It has one circular opening.
• The outside seems to be made of a papery substance.

That's right.  I took pictures for you.

I'm not actually convinced it is a beehive; couldn't it just as likely be a wasp's nest?  If it's a beehive, I hope the City can get some kind of bee expert, um, person, in there to relocate it.  Shouldn't they be doing that now, while it's cold?  Do bees experience a season of dormancy in the winter?  Are you beginning to see I should never have gone near this thing?  If it is a wasp's nest, I say kill them all, although a quick google search tells me that some people want to Save The Wasps.  I'm not convinced; just thinking about the way they drone around with those creepy legs dangling underneath them makes me shudder.  And besides, according to this Arizona Extension agent (and apparent wasp lover):

"The benefits of wasps usually outweigh potential for harm unless a nest is in a high traffic area such as a doorway or outdoor living area. When approached, paper wasps leave the nest and dive bomb intruders occasionally inflicting painful stings. Both wasps and yellow jackets can sting multiple times."

Our kids are at that bus stop twice a day, five days a week, and as much fun as fleeing dive-bombing wasps sounds, I think I'll be stopping into city hall tomorrow to have a word with whomever is unfortunate enough to have to deal with this kind of thing.

Okay, so I can't just stop there, because the more I google about wasps, the weirder/funnier it gets.  Michigan State University Extension says,

"The larger nests of yellowjackets and baldfaced hornets that are protected by a paper mache envelope are more challenging and best left to pest control professionals. But, if you are bound and determined to try yourself, then in addition to nest location, your speed and agility should be honestly evaluated. [!!!!] The slow and clumsy should seriously reconsider hiring a pest control company. [!!!!!] No attempt should be made to kill a nest that is located high in the upper branches of a tree if you think a ladder will be required to reach the nest. For reasons that should be obvious, a nest full of angry wasps and a fool on a ladder is a potentially dangerous and life-threatening combination.[!!!!!] If the nest is located close to the ground in a tree, shrub or on a building, then you may have a fighting chance to survive the experience. [!!!!!]"    

[Bracketed exclamation points added by yours truly to denote every time I laughed/gasped in horror while reading this.]

I'm thinking I'm going to ask to be alerted if they do try and remove that nest- Cade and I will have to round up our binoculars and go watch, from a suitable distance, with 911 ready on my phone.  I've seen My Girl, and I know how slow and clumsy I can be.   

No good can come of this.

A Coffee Timeline

September 30th:  Drink coffee.  So good.

October 1st:  Drink coffee.  Mmm.

October 2nd:  Drink coffee.  Southern butter pecan creamer, you complete me.

October 3rd:  Drink coffee.  Feel a tiny niggle of... something... deep in the recesses of my brain.

October 4th:  Drink coffee.  Ah, yes.  I know what that is:  Paranoia.  Hello, old chum.

October 5th:  Drink coffee.  Dismiss paranoia and its associated nonsense regarding my coffee.

October 6th:  Drink coffee.  Attempt to dismiss paranoia.  Stare distrustfully into my coffee cup.

October 7th:  Drink half a cup of coffee.  Upgrade paranoia to suspicion.

October 8th:  Do a google search.  Find this article, begin to roll my eyes, believing it to be yet another "All your food is evil and also chemicals" post (newsflash, internet:  EVERYTHING is chemicals), but its source is an NPR interview.  Confirm I have been drinking essence of cockroach.

October 9th:  Discover this handy/terrifying chart illustrating how much ground insect the FDA allows in ground coffee.  Retch.

October 10th:  Buy bag of whole coffee beans.  Use canny little mini-blender thing I got for Christmas last year but have never used.  It has a grinding blade!  It's a (10 month overdue) Christmas miracle!

October 11th:  Drink coffee.  Yes to the creamer but hold the cockroaches, please.

Oh, that?  That's just a teensy piece of roach carapace, daughter mine.  Drinky, drinky.

Five Things Friday

• It's been one of those weeks, hasn't it?  Everywhere you turn, terrible, terrible things are happening, and then, when you're still reeling from the news, people start saying the most moronic, the most utterly hateful things and then have the gall to call it capital-T Truth, because apparently you get to do that when you're a Christian blogger and there is no end to your finger-pointing and your ugly, disturbing pride.  I see this man's blog shared and liked by well-meaning Christian acquaintances all over social media, and even though I know it's going to make me so angry stars bust across my vision, I do it.  I click through and I read.  Then I go on and on and on about it to Derek who eventually asks, "Why were you reading this guy's blog again?" and I have to say "I DON'T KNOW."  

I ended up spending waaaay too much mental energy on the whole thing, but thankfully I had the two Ann's to pull me out of the fury twister I was riding; both wrote beautiful pieces on mental illness and Christ and suicide and compassion.  (Actually it's Anne and Ann- I think I've made it clear how important spelling is to me.)  I encourage you to click on their correctly spelled names and read what they had to say.

• I have seen one, I repeat, ONE, Japanese beetle this year.  According to the Iowa Gardener, this is because of our last brutally cold winter; it killed most of the larvae happily sleeping in our soil (now millions of tiny corpses, MUAHAHAHA), and the large amounts of rain we got in the spring drowned out the rest.  Hal-lay-loo-yer and pass the basil that hasn't been eaten alive by beetles this year.

• This was our last full week of summer vacation.  School begins next Wednesday.  Adelaide is mostly ready.  Atticus is pensive.  I am saying what I say every summer:  "Hmm.  Homeschooling is suddenly very, very attractive."  Caedmon still believes he will soon be attending preschool, because he's three and when he says, "I am Batman," in his mind he is Batman, so why shouldn't "Adelaide's going to third grade, Atticus is going to Kindergarten, and I'm going to preschool!" likewise work?  Never mind that I've spent the last four months telling him he has a whole 'nother year before preschool- I'm just the Mother, what do I know?

• This week has been a good running week.  Not too hot, not too humid, and my various injuries have finally shut themselves up enough for me to run, run, run. 

I appreciate this all the more because this summer was the summer that I realized I'm not 21 anymore, and when my old lower back injury flares or my shin splints make themselves known I don't just get to elevate a foot or apply a heating pad for an evening; nooo, I have to rest and ice and coddle these high maintenance body parts for days on end before they'll give me so much as a couple miles.  Let's not forget about the asthma attacks, either, one that started to hit me when I was four miles from home and turned legitimately scary- and honestly, I don't scare easy when it comes to these two divas that I call lungs- I imagine the home that they have made in my rib cage to be some sort of Liberace-meets- the creator of the Bedazzler monstrosity, and they have one whole wall with different velvet knotted ropes hanging, each with each own placard:  "the gut," "the throat," "the skin," and on and on, and when they pull on each they make its subsequent organ break out in hives or swell or do a peristaltic boogie and Dance, Monkey, Dance.  I realize that it's my immune system that's really the problem, here; it's just that I've long thought of my lungs as my own personal mental whipping boy.  They're not to be trusted, and I'm sure they feel the same way about me.
I do try to keep in mind that even when All The Parts are hurting All at The Same Time, I still don't feel as bad as I did in my third trimester of my pregnancy with Caedmon, when my body said, "You want another pregnancy?  Okay, lady, I'm going to pregnancy symptom you TO DEATH."  This is why I laughed so hard when I first saw this on Pinterest a couple weeks ago:

I feel like that cat's face is the mental face I'm making half my waking hours.  Somehow Derek didn't find this photo as funny as I did (I roar every time I see it)- but then, he's never been pregnant.

• I couldn't think of a fifth thing in the three minutes I have to finish this post, so I called upon Adelaide in my hour of need, and here's what she's happy about right this second:

"Back To School Night is only three days from today, and school is only five days from today."  It's almost like she wants to leave me.  

Virtual Garden Tour

When I recently saw Common Household Mom propose the idea of a Virtual Garden Tour, my first thought was, "Aw.  Too bad I don't qualify."  Because in order to participate in a garden tour, you need gardens, of course, of the studied, orderly, English variety.  Sure, I love to garden, and sure, I love to take low-quality photos of my flowers to the point that my camera has more pictures of flora on it than Crisler-begotten fauna.  Besides, my sunflowers aren't blooming yet, and without them, there's just no point.

Still, I've been reading some terrific stuff lately about how perfectionism is the death of productivity and creativity and probably more important things like the Oxford comma, so... here goes.  Here's what's blooming in my neck of the woods.

Daylilies!  A couple years ago my mom's husband's niece (still with me?) moved to a house in Wichita that had previously been home to an older gentleman who had been a member of the Wichita Daylily Society (how wild and raucous do you reckon those meetings are?) and had planted all kinds of daylilies all over the yard.  This niece isn't much of a flower person (fortunately I have met her and she is exceedingly nice, and thus did not allow my brain to judge her too harshly), and so chose to do the right thing and gave a bunch to me.  Well, she gave buckets-full to my mom and Mark, and they shared some with me.  Whatever.  So this year I have several new and unexpected splashes of color around our yard, although I can already tell I'm going to need to re-transplant several varieties; not enough sun on some of them.

This one came with a little plaque that reads "'Firepower' E.W. Brown-1984."  I'm assuming E.W. is the person who created this hybrid?  Or something?

The next two were already here; I planted them a few years ago.  I love them just as much as the flashy new guys, and tell them so every time I'm outside.

These are less orange and more of a buttery-yellow outside of my demon camera.

The above red ones look similar to the Huning lilies I wrote about recently, except they have more red and aren't taller than I am.  They're wet because it never stops raining in Iowa.  At least not this summer.

The coneflowers are also blooming:

They're usually home to a few spiderwebs:

And speaking of spiderwebs-

I'm convinced Viktor weaves these webs nightly, doing his part to protect our family.  

You can't take two steps across our grass without encountering one of these.  It's funny, spiders completely eek me out when they're in the house, but outside, I want to see as many as possible, perhaps because this is what our children look like right now:

Click to embiggen and see Cade's poor, poor forehead.

A cool, wet summer means millions upon millions of mosquitoes, all feasting upon the flesh of my babies.  This angers me.  It angers me greatly.

Not all the bugs are ire-provoking, however.  I spent an absurd amount of time watching this little fella on a sunflower leaf this morning.  He was right at eye-level, after all.

Anybody know what this multi-colored friend might be?  Because I am, as usual, clueless.

The vegetable garden's sending out its first produce of the summer (aside from the mass quantities of lettuce it attempted to drown us in, of course):

And look here- the gourds are starting to grow!  I could have sworn I planted 10 Commandments here, but this doesn't look quite right, so... blargh.  One of these years I really, really will start a gardening journal.  I mean it this time.

The zucchini are also just gearing up, and it's beginning to look like I'm going to be breaking and entering people's homes just to leave some surprise zucchini and get it out of my garden.  I'll be the Zucchini Fairy, which is like the Tooth Fairy except I won't traffic in human body parts!  

That's it:  An Iowa garden in July.  Thanks for hosting, CHM!

Freedom and Stuff

July 3rd I put on my dusty Creative Mom hat and had our kids do a fun Independence Day-themed craft that ended up looking like we trailed random bits of glue and salt all over black construction paper then sprayed it with blood.  This was all true except for the blood- that was just food coloring.  The sad part was when Atticus asked what the heck they were supposed to look like and I told him, "Fireworks, of course!" his response was "What are 'fireworks'?"

The problem with fireworks is that they're usually set off when it's dark which has a disturbing tendency to come about late at night.  I have this thing about our kids sleeping at night, so... it's true.  Two of our three children had never seen fireworks.  I'm not sorry.  (A friend of mine unabashedly dislikes fireworks.  "It's like watching money explode in the air!"  This is hilarious to me.)

This year, however, despite the fact that Derek had to work, I decided to brave the throngs of patriotic people (another reason not to attend fireworks displays- no offense, my fellow Americans), solely because Derek's parents offered to come help wrangle the children.  So off we went to Reiman Gardens to listen to a local municipal band and look at flowers and harass Derek while he tried to work.  And watch fireworks.

They say grandchildren keep you young (although I have a sneaking suspicion "they" are people without grandchildren), probably through activities like this one:

Take this little child-flippy-thing times fifty and you have a substantial percentage of Derek's dad's evening.

As our children see any grandparent trying to rest on the ground as an open invitation for super-fun-human-trampoline-time, Dennis soon suggested we tour the gardens.  

Why, yes, this is a statue of a rabbit in a giant garden, but I can't decide whether I should be crying "WHYYYYY?" to the heavens when seeing this or laughing because he looks like Psycho-Not-To-Be-Trusted Rabbit, which, in my possibly unbalanced opinion, is how all gardeners should view rabbits.  

Gnomes are, of course, another popular garden feature:

Friends, meet Elwood, the World's Largest Concrete Gnome.  Elwood was nice and everything, but he's no Viktor. 

He meant nothing to us, Viktor.  Nothing.

And what did we find in the children's area?

A whole string of Tardis's!  (What's the consensus on the plural for "Tardis"?  Tardis's?  Tardii?)  I'm not real sure what Doctor Who has to do with flowers, but when something this awesome happens, I'm not inclined to question it much.

Weeping Angels plus Children's Area equals... Fun?  Education?  Nightmares?

Never mind that, children- look at this Sonic Screwdriver Windchime!

You know, for being at a public garden and, you know, loving flowers the way I do, I took very few photos of flowers while we were there.  And by "very few" I mean ZERO, because I'm a failure.  

I did photograph some Wild Caedmon while I was there, though, so it wasn't a total loss.  Is it just me, or does Cade look more like a forty-year-old man here than a three-year-old boy?

We also made sure to pester Derek a bit before the fireworks started:

Believe me, we are terrific pester-ers.

We finished the evening by introducing our children to the wonder of a fireworks show.  They liked it.  A bit.

I've spent the past four days recovering from all this frivolity, and reckon I'll be ready to do it all again in right about one year, which is an 95% attitude improvement from how I felt while waiting 45 minutes to get out of the blasted parking lot because no one was there to direct traffic.  

Merry America, friends!

June in Photos+Words

Somehow June is over.  While I'm not entirely sure how this happened, I thought it would be fun to do a "June in Photos" post with just pictures and no words, but then I remembered that I'm me and I can't do no words.  So I'm just going to put up a bunch of pics of stuff we did a lot in June, and also type a bunch of words in between.  Gracious, this post is breathtakingly exciting already.

Adelaide and I spent a lot of time sitting on the front porch, reading and sipping iced coffee (which can I just say is half milk with a heavy dollop of creamer, and it's a small glass full of ice, so just back off, mother-hating, caffeine-eschewing antagonists) (turns out I'm also a tad defensive today.  Huh.), because June was bee-you-ti-full, at least until it started raining and never ever stopped <insert requisite diluvial joke here>.  

And when the cats and dogs started a-comin' down, we moved ourselves indoors.  

We also forced reading upon others, me via this blog, Adelaide via the prisoners she calls toys.

Caedmon spent an alarming amount of time staring at his hands, which was a little worrisome until he told me he was trying to "get my fingers to do the fing that Spider-Man does when he shoots out his web."

This is not, in fact, how Spider-Man do, but I just have to ask:  Can you do this?  His ring finger is lying flat against his palm, his other four digits are extended straight, and he doesn't appear to be in any pain, which is all the opposite of what happens when I try and contort my hand in just such a fashion.

Our June was, of course, full of flowers, as we are not heathens.  Hello, peonies.

Hello, Huning lily.

These lilies, transplanted from Kansas to our fertile Iowa soil, have spread several feet in both directions and are seemingly intent on backyard domination.  I'll have to divide them next year, if anyone's in the market for ditch lilies.

Hello, yarrow.

Hello, Asiatic lilies.

Hello, scrumptious basil and vivid coleus.

Halloo, zucchini jungle.

Hello, spider in my sunflower.

You'll have to click to embiggen in order to see the spider and his web.

The boys spent mucho time golfing in the backyard.

That's a lovely golfer's tan you're wearing, Derek.

I became a bit obsessive over the birds nesting in our front yard.

Look at their wittle grumpy faces.  Haven't they grown?

You know what almost all these photos have in common?  GREEN.  They're all so green!  Time is racing by, and I'm trying to enjoy how lush it is outside without panicking a bit at the thought that every day we're a bit closer to the white wasteland that is winter.  You know, just to end this post on a positive note.