I fought the lawn… and the lawn won
I discovered an “experimental column” in the L.A. Times called “Outside the Tent, in which the Times “invites outside critics to rip a Southern California newspaper whose most popular features include a weekly column on celebrity real estate transactions.”
I had to check it out! Right away I found the very funny “This One’s Waaaaay Outside the Tent” by Bob Sipchen, Sunday Opinion Editor. Continue reading “On the Woeful, Boneheaded Spurning of Puffery”
It was a bumpy switch from web host to web host in order to get my permalinks working, but with help from several sources I learned all about the miracles of propagation. (And no, Mom, propagation is not what you think it is.) Continue reading “Podz to the Rescue”
Most Geek Wannabes know exactly what to do when we can’t solve a problem on our own: run to the Real Geeks for help. Continue reading “Thanks to Jennifer & Kato”
Decisions, decisions. Introducing my latest obsession: WordPress Blogging Software. Continue reading “Moving into WordPress”
March 1.
Spring is almost here! Woohoo! Birds are chirping, flowers blooming, the whole world is waking up. Spring! That grand time of year when a woman’s thoughts turn to…
Swimsuit season? Holy cow! It’s only a few months away−and I’m WAY out of shape!
A long time ago Hubby wanted an English Bulldog, a desire I sincerely felt was about as kooky as wanting to spend a couple of nights dangling off Mt. Everest. I mean, sure, it’s something we CAN do, but why would we WANT to?
Not only are bulldogs funky-looking, but they are famous for being difficult to train and having serious health problems that cost their owners beaucoup bucks.
So Hubby and I compromised. I got to pick our first dog because our boys were still young and he felt I would know better what would work best with our family at that time.
And then later—in the far, far away future—he’d get to pick the next dog, when our boys were older and could help out and it really didn’t matter if I had to work a bit harder with our dog.
So in 1993 I picked a Standard Poodle. What wonderful dog he turned out to be! Clean, non-shedding, friendly and ultra-patient with kids. Training was a breeze—he was house-broken almost immediately and was the star pupil in all his obedience classes. He doesn’t yap, he loves to go camping, and everyone adores him.
But now Casey Dog is getting old. At age 12 he’s still pretty spry for a Standard, but he’s going deaf and he sleeps a lot. And now Hubby is reminding me of my promise.
And Hubby wants a bulldog.
He doesn’t care about the cost of a bulldog. He doesn’t care how we’ll spend a fortune on veterinary bills. He doesn’t care about how we’ll probably lose all of our furniture legs to little bulldog teething patterns.
Nope.
My strongest and best argument was how a Bulldog puppy would be murder on our carpets, because bulldogs take forever to house-break. So Hubby agreed to replace our elderly carpet with a laminate floor. After we installed the floor last summer I was plum out of arguments.
So now we’re getting a bulldog.
There comes a time in every woman’s life when she’s got to decide whether or not she’s going to keep the vow she made when she was young and naive, back in the days when her head was full of hearts and flowers and her love life seemed like a juicy romance novel.
That time had come for me. What I was doing wasn’t working any more. The only option left was to go back on everything I’d ever believed and enter a brave, new world of excitement, thrills and dangerous liaisons.
But would Hubby let me?
“Get real,” he said, without even looking up from the paper. “The last time I tried to help you with your workout program you attacked me with a dumbbell. Thank God Rita held you back.”
“I’ve changed,” I said, hoping the tone in my voice showed how much. “I’ve seen the light. Rita can’t work out anymore and I can’t do it by myself. I need you.”
He grunted.
“Really and truly. According to our friends and family, your stellar pectorals make you a highly sought-out personal trainer. And I need one.”
The blunt approach always works best. Besides, it was the truth. I mean, why buy a cow when you’re married to the milkman? And he looks like Arnie Schwarzenegger?
His eyebrows rose over the top of the newspaper. “You’ll do everything I tell you to do? No complaining? No more flying dumbbells?”
“I promise.”
“And you’ll let me weigh you?”
I swallowed. Hard.
“Well?”
“Okay, OKAY!'”
He tossed the paper aside and jumped up, rubbing his hands together.
“Do you realize,” he said gleefully, “that in all these years of marriage I’ve never known how much you weighed?”
Like I was supposed to tell him? Where do men get these weird ideas?
“Onto the scale!” he ordered.
“I can’t weigh myself now!” I cried, appalled. “Why, it’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon!”
He looked at me like I had asked him to read a few lines from the latest bodice-ripper. Like he really didn’t know that there is only one Right Way to Weigh Yourself, a universally-accepted procedure consisting of the following steps:
Unfortunately, my man adheres to The Wrong Way to Weigh Yourself, an imprudent process practiced at health clubs and medical offices and consisting of the following steps:
This wildly risky method has been known to startle a scale into reckoning you weigh 5 or 10 pounds more than you really do.
Like Hubby cares.
“I’m waiting!” he said impatiently.
I was pretty much forced to leap fully-clothed onto a poor, unsuspecting scale with breakfast and lunch under my belt. Naturally, the scale spooked. Big time.
In fact, it would’ve stampeded out of the bathroom if I hadn’t pinned it down to the floor.
“Holy cow!” exclaimed Hubby. I reached for the dumbbell rack.
“I was kidding!” he added hurriedly. “Really. It was a joke.”
Ha.
I guess all this means we are really and truly married now. And perhaps it also signifies a whole new chapter in our relationship–heck, maybe even a whole new romance novel!
I could call it… The Holy Cow and the Milkman.
Danielle Steele, eat your heart out.
Bam! Bam! BAM!
Jeez. Can’t a woman take a shower in peace?
Not if she’s a mother.
“This better be important!” I hollered. “I’m talking blood! Or fire!”
The door pounding stopped and I resumed my shower.
As usual, I can never shower by myself. If it isn’t a knock at the door, it’s one of those noisy split-personality debates Hubby says I should never tell anybody about.
This particular debate was between the Mother and the Woman.
“What if,” asked the Mother, “the pounding stopped because a psychopathic killer entered the house and the child had to run for it?”
The razor skidded to a halt on my knee as I considered this.
“Ha!” snickered the Woman. “More likely the kid remembered you keep the milk in the refrigerator. Or maybe his brother threatened to feed oatmeal to the dog.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” mused the Mother. “Remember reading about that deranged drug-user who broke into a house with a shovel? Thank goodness the parents were home, heard their kids’ cries for help and saved them before he–”
“Come on!” groaned the Woman. “How many times do we have to stop showering, using the toilet or whatever, just so we can answer a pint-sized door pounder who wants to know ‘which is worse, eating a live scorpion or being attacked by killer bees?'”
The Mother chuckled. “Wasn’t that cute! They’re so imaginative, so young, so… defenseless… If there is a psychopath in the house brandishing a large garden tool, they’ll be –”
“They’ll be toast!” blasted the Woman. “Does Peter and the Wolf ring a bell? I refuse to answer that door! They’ve cried wolf too many times.”
“How cruel you are,” sniffed the Mother. “All you care about is shaving these legs which, by the way, have proven time and time again that they reforest themselves within 24 hours. But the grief and suffering of a bloody aftermath? That lasts FOREVER.”
When the Woman didn’t respond, the Mother pressed on.
“Interrupt our shower and what have we lost? A minute! But what’s a minute to two small boys, clinging to each other in fear, holding up their little arms in one last, brave effort to deflect the blows of a maniac wielding a pick axe?”
The three of us stumbled over each other in a crazed attempt to get out of the shower and throw on a towel.
“I’m coming, boys!” I cried, unlocking the door and rushing into the empty living room.
“Now that’s just great!” swore the Woman. “Just clue Mr. Maniac into the fact that you’re here!”
“No gore on the walls or the carpet,” whispered the Mother. “That’s a good sign.”
I grabbed my son’s chess trophy off the piano and crept up the stairs, my eye on the closed bedroom door.
It was too quiet. Throwing all caution downstairs, I burst through their door.
The boys looked up at me from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
“Yeah, Mom?”
The Mother sighed in relief. The Woman slapped her forehead in disgust.
“Who,” I asked through gritted teeth, “pounded on my door?”
They looked confused. Then the oldest brightened.
“Oh! That was me, Mom. I needed some underwear but then I realized you were taking a shower so I looked in my drawer and found some.”
“Hey, Mom!” said my youngest, poking at my shin with his index finger. “You got shaving cream all over your legs!”
As I embarked upon one of my loudest lectures (entitled, “Why We Save Pounding on a Locked Bathroom Door for Emergencies, Unless We Want to Hear a Lot of French”) the Mother began another internal debate.
“What if–”
“Oh, shut up!” snapped the Woman.
“Lookin’ good, baby,” said the hunk, but not to me.
I hadn’t visited Las Vegas since the 80s. Back then, Duran Duran was hungry like the wolf and this pool-side stud guzzled his bottles as fast as I could hand them to him.
A lot changes in 18 years.
“Baby, c’mere and meet my aunt. She changed my diapers.”
Meet my nephew, the Wolf. And that was supposed to be my line, but somehow it didn’t sound as funny as it did when I said it.
Grumbling, I smeared on 50+ sunscreen while Wolfie continued his running commentary on the prospective conquests floating by in rental tubes.
“Oh, yeah! Looking fine, baby. Come to ME, baby!”
It was hard to take him seriously, seeing as how I knew him when he barely came to my kneecap. But this boy wasn’t just talking big. Women were clutching at his trawling line as if it was a life preserver and they were going under for the third time.
“See that sexy older babe over there?” Wolfie sucked his breath through his teeth. “We went out last night. ”
I put on my prescription sunglasses to better examine this cradle-robbing senior. When I focused, I gasped. Older women were supposed to be… older… than me. But this gal was thirty if she was a day, and had a body that qualified her for Baywatch duty.
She smiled and winked at Wolfie.
“She’s twenty-eight,” he said reverently as he waved back. “She knows a lot.”
Sipping my mineral water, I carefully noted her leopard-print bikini, her deep, golden tan, her gravity-defying… Thompson Twins… just in case I needed to pick her out of a lineup of child predators.
“Yeah,” Wolfie added meaningfully, doing that breath thing again with his teeth, “I took her back to my room last night.”
The mineral water burst out of my nose. “You what!”
He frowned. “But Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me keep her.”
“Well, she’s not a lost kitten, for crying out loud!”
“No, she’s a German kitten. And in Germany, older kittens appreciate younger men.”
If any more kittens appreciated this young man he’d be classified as a Pet Shop Boy. “Do they appreciate getting tossed out of hotel rooms?”
Wolfie sighed, no doubt wishing he could get his money for nothing and his chicks for free. But Mom and Dad were paying for this trip.
“Oh, baby,” he suddenly said, and not to me. “You da bomb! Bomb, baby!”
Bomb Baby whipped around, her hands planted firmly on what couldn’t been more than 33-inch hips as she disdainfully surveyed the dude who dared lay lustful eyes upon her. Her eyes narrowed dangerously and I ducked.
Wolfie intensified his monologue. “Oh, yeah, baby, bomb! You vain, baby. You something else.” Not only was he disposing of all conventional verbs, he was growling. “Come on, baby, turn around! Gimme a look at that prime merchandise.”
“Stop it!” I hissed from under People’s “Where are they now?” section, where my zinc-oxided nose was smearing Boy George’s makeup.
“Oh, yeah, you fine! You bomb!” Wolfie threw back his head and howled.
I grabbed my towel, ready to run.
But Bomb Baby didn’t attack. Her head and shoulders began to bob, like one of those toy dogs in the rear windows of cars. A sly smile spread over her lips.
Wolfie’s head bobbed up and down, too. Bomb Baby bobbed. Wolfie bobbed. For a moment I was confused. Didn’t I just see this on Animal Planet?
Then Bomb Baby slowly turned and began to walk away, all of her bob-bob-bobbing along as she gave Wolfie the requested scenery.
“Oooohhh!” he moaned, “Oh, yeah. Ohhh yea-AAAAAGH!”
He fell back on his chaise lounge, spent.
“Are you through?” I snapped. “Do you want a cigarette?”
He popped up again. “You are so funny, Aunt Bonnie. You know I don’t smoke. But–” he used the tone he used when he was six and wanted a Popsicle from the ice cream truck, “how ’bout a beer?”
I didn’t care if the 80s were long gone. The only bottle I’d let this cub guzzle was root beer.
Based on my personal experience in the last few months, I have to say, “yes and no.” (Nothing like a definitive answer, is there?)
Certainly they seemed to have absolutely no effect whatsoever on whiteflies, aphids or Argentine Ants. However, I observed sow bugs and earwigs leaving the plots treated with worm castings. Continue reading “Will Worm Castings Keep Garden Pests Out of Your Yard?”