Good Enough

Because when I saw a huge one over my shoulder this evening and screamed bloody murder it backed away quickly and was lost in the confines of “behind the couch.”

I should take you back to two months ago when I was vacationing in sunny Southern California, minding my own business when I received a call from Mr.Good.

“There’s been an interesting development around here.” He said.

“What do you mean?” I tried not to panic immediately, as it is in my nature to do so. But all the possibilities were running through my mind.  This could be the landlord must have found out we had a dog and we’ve been evicted  type of interesting development or another one of his employees stole from him type of development or he’s contracted a rare disease and we don’t have health insurance…type of interesting development.  Whatever it was I would try to hold it together and be calm.

“We have spiders,” he continued. “I was sitting on the couch and a huge one came up behind me. I also caught one that looked similar in the garage. I caught it and Googled poisonous spiders of Washington and the Hobo spider came up. It’s as destructive as the Brown Recluse, and I think our house is full of them.”

“Spiders!” I thought. “Spiders! This is the disaster I was imagining?” Well I could handle spiders. I calmly told him bomb the house.

“That’s not suggested.” Mr.Good replied. “The bomb will kill their only other living predators. Then they’ll come back stronger.”

“Well, vacuum every room in the house then!” (for goodness sake man, they’re just spiders!)

But as he told me more, I became more worried. Hobos apparently are not good climbers. But our mattress is still on the floor! There was nothing I could do about it while I was enjoying my vacation. So I put it out of my mind and tried to trust the man to take care of it.

September came and went, uneventfully. I never saw any spiders…but it was incentive to keep things properly dusted and de-cluttered. Apparently Hobos love to live in piles of clothes. Today is October 1st. And today, as I was chillin’ on the couch watching Meerkat Manor ( a disturbingly violent animal documentary) my daughter (who was standing in front facing my direction) got a queer look on her face. “Come out here little spider!” she beguiled.

That’s when I decided to peer over my shoulder…just in case.

There was the biggest spider I’ve ever seen in my life!!!  And as I screamed, it backed away and I hoped it wasn’t lost forever. I got out my weapon of choice, the vacuum. But as I pulled the couch away from the wall the arachnid had seemingly disappeared. After much swooshing with my weapon and tugging of the slip cover…it appeared again! My mind hadn’t played any tricks on me, it was even bigger than I thought the first time!

And that’s when I sucked it up! I kept the vacuum running for a few minutes of good measure. I just knew that spider would come back out if I didn’t. When I pulled out the cannister and looked inside I could see it kicking. I couldn’t help it. I had to scoop it out and put it in a jar. It was just to awesome of a creature not to show it off.

So now it sits in a jar on my shelf in the living room. I don’t think it really survived the suction. It’s not moving anymore.

Mr. Good came home and confirmed that it was indeed a Hobo. So the war must rage on my friends. Until next time!

I swear this is ACTUAL SIZE! PEOPLE!

    updated two hours after original post…Kathryn stopped by to drop off my laundry, don’t ask why she had my laundry, but she pointed out a “huge spider on the wall” it was another Hobo. Yes, they’re trying to infiltrate.

I would have written yesterday but I just received a copy of this months book club book. Book club is today, so you see, yesterday I was committed to reading it in it’s entirety. Well worth it. I loved the book and it didn’t take me long. My house work didn’t even suffer! I’m looking forward to book club, I really love the women that come. But I swear, if I hear that someone was an English major when they’re trying to make a point I’m going TO BARF! Do you know what I mean? Do you have those 3 English Majors in your group? All very nice ladies, but CHILL OUT ABOUT IT tonight. I just can’t handle it with the dark mood that I’m in.

Well folks, The Office is back and treating us to a 1 hour episode this Thursday night at 9 pm! To celebrate I’ve bought some prizes that any Office fan would be more than delighted to own… or re-gift.

To win the mystery Office Goody Basket, please leave your predictions for Thursday’s episode, and your favorite office quote in the comment section. I will be drawing names from the list, and since I get about 10 comments per post, you have a 1 in 10 chance of winning the prize! Isn’t that cool?

Also, only residents of the United States are going to qualify for the win…sorry, I can’t afford the shipping to places like Australia!

Good Luck! And happy Office viewing!

Yet another adventure for the domestically challenged…

Kathryn wrote about her challenges she is facing with over-scheduling and becoming a little too ambitious in the home- making category. I don’t disagree with her on what she said about doing too much…to know her is to understand the hurricane that is the Daring Young Mom. When she does something, she does it with gusto and passion. Please read the post and take note of the beautiful pictures.

I, on the other hand, rarely feel overwhelmed by my domesticity. I don’t like feeling over-worked and under-appreciated. Mr.Good rarely notices if the house is clean or dirty. This frees up my need to clean for anyone other than myself. I warn my friends that they take their chances when coming to my house. You just never know what you going to get.

Although I love to cook, I hate grocery shopping, and the money I spend on rare ingredients that go into a delicious meal. After my third child was born I didn’t know how I was going to get dinner on the table ever again. I found the answer here and my life has become monumentally easier, and dinners have remained tasty.

I don’t sew, or craft, and I’m very bad with yeast products…my garden consists of 3 ears of corn, one pumpkin, 2 cherry tomato plants, 3 cucumber plants (2 if you don’t count the one that died) and a few pots of strawberry plants. These all get tended to when I feel like being outside with my kids.

I’m not trying to bash on myself, my strength remains in my ability to have fun with my kids. That’s why I became a mom…all the rest of this homemaking stuff is something I do to make life a little more interesting. I really do look at each new experience as an adventure. If you’re a stay-at-home-mom you have to find joy in small things.

Take the canning experience…I don’t think the canning was necessarily cheaper than buying a box of canned peaches at Costco, but I enjoy helping out the local economy and I like to know where my food comes from.

I also wanted to can because I wanted to understand part of my heritage. My mother and grandmother and great grandmother all had to can. I have some jars that they used. It was exciting to me to learn how it was done. I could have never done it alone, so I tricked Kathryn into doing it with me. She was fabulous and even started a day ahead of time and in doing so made all the mistakes before I got there. And she let me mess up her kitchen!

When I have my dream farm (which will hopefully come to pass in the next 5 years) I don’t want to waste the food that I toil over. I have visions of neighbors and friends coming over to reap what we’ve made. Heaven knows I need a good reason to get outside in this dreary Northwest weather, and animals and plants just might make me get out of bed in the morning. Despite the frigid, wet air.

I liked canning. Next time I’ll start it earlier in the day, and in a mere six hours I’ll finish two boxes with time left over to relax and watch some movies. That’s not necessarily something Great Grandmother could enjoy!  So take it easy on yourself people! Don’t do something you don’t want to do, unless it involves changing diapers and feeding the family. These are two must-do’s you can’t get out of them. Everything else is negotiable.

Last night I went to bed with a knot in my stomach.

I hadn’t checked my voice mail in a few days and when I checked it that afternoon it revealed at least 3 messages from Buster’s 1st grade teacher. The reason I say AT LEAST is because I was feeling like such a bad mother by the 3rd message I couldn’t and wouldn’t listen to the rest of  my phone messages, for fear she had left more. By the third message she had left her home phone number which I immediately called. I got her voice mail.  I left a cryptict message stammering about how I usually always answer my cell phone, and I didn’t have her number identified on my phone so this is the reason I didn’t recognize it, and I hardly ever checked my voicemail, choosing instead to call the person back, blah blah blah…I was embarrassed by my message. I wanted to erase it and start over. My grammar was all over the place, I had run-on sentences. There is no way this teacher would approve of my message! She could judge my whole parenting style on this one single message! I knew she would pick me out as one of those mothers that just didn’t have it together.

She left no details as to what the problem was. this was cruel. My mind began to wander to the problems of yesteryear…Had he yet again “karate chopped another student in the mouth? Did he start wrestling with his buddies in the classroom? Did he defend a fellow students honor by getting in a shoving war at recess? The possiblilties were endless!

Oh why didn’t she answer her phone?

To make matters worse she called my home phone even though I specified that’d I’d anxiously be waiting by my cell phone all evening. The message on my land line explained that I had left my cell as the main number to be contacted, but she could switch it to my land line. I know I was in a vulnerable state, but I think I detected some sarcasm in her voice.

Oh why couldn’t I just get a hold of her!

It was too late at this point to call her home, so I called her voicemail at school. I wanted to have another chance at leaving a voicemail….this one was going to be very organized, and concise.

Hi Mrs. Soandso…it’s Eve, Busters mom? I’m so sorry that I missed your call again, please don’t switch the numbers on my information sheet, the cell is really the best one to reach me during the day, sometimes my two year old turns the answering machine off at home so that isn’t always reliable…I’m so sorry you haven’t been able to reach me, this usually doesn’t happen. It’s a little scary what if Buster had been hurt at school and you couldn’t get a hold of me. But anyway BEEEEPPPP!

And just like that I was cut off, and yet again my message was  unimpressive to say the least. I went to bed with a heavy heart. What was Busters problem?

This morning I called the room number again, hoping she would be in early.

She was! She was very nice and informed me that Buster had been misusing school materials, having sword fights with pencils, and he actually received an injury from himself during a round of battles. He also had been cutting his hair and clothes with the scissors…What? He’s been using scissors since preschool and always been responsible. We had a good conversation, though I know I still sounded a little scattered, it was better when I wasn’t talking to a machine.

In the end she just wanted me to be aware and talking with Buster about these things, so he knew that he couldn’t get away with them. She did say he had a problem keeping his hands to himself, especially around his “buddies” but she had him sitting between girls during circle time and that seemed to help him sit a little more quietly.

Oh the woes of children in school…and Buster has always been my good one.  

Chilihead tagged me for this meme and these are the rules…

       1.) You have to post the rules before you give the facts.

       2.)Players - You must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your middle name.  If you  

      don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had.

       3.)At the end of your post, you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag.

This may be a little rough…I could lie about my middle name…it’s a long one! But I love my middle name as I share it with my Great Aunt because I was born on her birthday, and I love her.

V~ volatile. Sometimes around certain times of the month, I get slightly volatile…B12 seems to have taken the edge off.

I~  Idle. I am such a LAZY person! I have no desire to move unless I desire to move. 

R~ Rebellious. not something I’m proud of. I always want to fight “the man” even if the man is right.

G~ Generate. I have now generated 3 children…a thought that still amazes me. And I love them GREATLY.

I~Island. Sometimes these 3 children make me want to fly to a deserted island…and stay there…for a few days at least!

N~Napkins. We grew up without them. Although my mom will be mortified to read this…we used to have one “rag” at the table and we’d pass it around to anyone that asked for it. I was always slightly bewildered when other homes had “napkins.” They were a novelty to me!

I~Issue.While I enjoy honesty and love blogs that reflect that, what I have issue with is bitter people! I think we all have things we could be really bitter over, but MOVE ON! Make your life as good as you can and stop dwelling in the past! Get over it!

A~Academics. I would love to continue my education this year. I hope to begin further schooling in January.

Now I need to tag some people…

Unidentified Rantings Girl; Mammadoggylove; Temporary?Insanity; Hope is Power; Annie; Literary Geek; am I still going? Help me out Johnny; and Absolutely Bananas! 

Hello class, I’d like to share what I did this summer with you…and if you read this, you must share what you did. This is your assignment.

Snakes are fun! But I could never own one. The thought of feeding them live mice freaks me out. If only a snake could be a vegetarian?

Mr. Good gets friendly with them

I like them…?

Buster likes them.

Missy’s in love. She cried when we had to leave them.

The reason you don’t see a picture of Bubba holding one, is all he wanted to do was kick them. Why does he insist on kicking pets? It’s infuriating!

Huntington Beach

My surfer boy.

B-boys at the beach.

My kids were captivated. This was better than TV. They sat and watched for an hour!

Buster took this one.

We watched the sunset.

This picture was part of my much needed “Girls Night.” I love these two chicas.

Look closely. This house is the one in Beaches. Very fitting for an afternoon with girlfriends!

These are the only remaining friends I keep in contact with from High-school. We all have a lot of history together, and they love me anyway!

So that was my summer montage. What about yours?

She burst in through my lowly front door with a basket full of ingredients, a wheat grinder and various empty baking pans.

I could see the driven look in her eye…she came to bake, and she came to bake hard. Had I known what was in store for me in the next 8 hours I may have run and hid in my bedroom locking the door behind me! In her basket of torturous items she pulled out a wheat grinder and a bucket of whole wheat.  She began grinding the flour.   Hers was a super-mega-ultra electric wheat grinder, and the noise that this machine made was deafening. But it didn’t stop there, she was not satisfied with the grade of wheat that had been ground. “Let’s run it through again!” she cried, with a torturous gleam in her eye. The second time around was even worse, as the machine struggled to refine what had already been done once before. It seemed to scream for mercy. She relentlessly forced the flour through with her hands. It seemed like hours before she would shut off the machine.

“Oh this flour is so luscious!” She said, giddy with the excitement of it.

We began the day with the first batch of bread. I carefully measured as she instructed. “Let the yeast mixture ferment for an hour…” the recipe read. Good. Fermentation takes time.  Now was our chance to sit down and chat, I could definitely use some rest at this point in the day. It was then I noticed the time…lunch. I had four hungry children in my house. I threw together the old stand-by…the Mac and the Cheese…and silently prayed for some moments of rest.

“Oh good, now that the yeast is rising let’s get started on the cinnamon rolls!”

Cinnamon rolls? Is she serious?

On we worked, on and on into the evening. The cinnamon roll ingredients went into the bread maker. But we weren’t through yet. During the hour and a half they had to raise we made banana bread, and after that more whole wheat bread. She was relentless in her tasks and drove me forward in the baking effort.

For 8 hours we worked, stopping only to feed the children and put babies down for naps. The aroma of baked goods filled the house and drove us to a frenzied panic, waiting for the coveted cinnamon rolls to finish their raising, and baking. Then the frosting, the specially formulated frosting that took 30 minutes to mix at varying speeds. When it was finally done we could barely contain our emotions. Realizing the importance of the moment, we distracted the children with a short television program. We gently lifted the warm rolls from the pan. They were so light they practically floated on to our plates. Then we smothered them in the delicious frosting. We sat by the open window, watched the sun melt down across the horizon of trash cans placed on the street across from us, and we indulged.

I can say that we did enjoy the fruits of our labor that night, as we shed tears over the tender sweet flesh of those rolls. They were indeed the best I had ever partaken of. She called her husband and said “I can’t be with you. I’m with these cinnamon rolls now.”

We didn’t want to share them because they were so sumptuous, and yet we were so proud of our toils that we couldn’t help but share them with those that happened to smell the aromas and come by the house.

At the end of the night she left as quickly as she had come…taking with her the mammoth wheat grinder, the bread maker, the flour and the other sundries that were needed for our epicurean adventures.

I was left with two gorgeous loaves of whole wheat bread, a loaf of banana bread, and the leftover drippings on four empty pans where the cinnamon rolls had once tenderly been raised and baked and frosted.

The day took me a day to recover from. It was physically and emotionally draining.

And to Sarah, the author of the bread recipe, she asked whoever used it to contact her if they had any holes in their bread… Sarah, I think I found a hole!