The days are a blur of death and nachos...

I could make a lot of excuses for my blog absence, but they are largely boring, so I will spare you the details.

We have been spending huge chunks of our lives at our local beach, where we arrive with beach chairs, and snacks and murder mysteries. The mothers settle in together and chat while the children splash and swim and dig. Summer in my town is a very sweet kind of suburban perfection. I am keenly aware of how blessed my days are and how lucky I am to be keeping such great company. I will not forget the flavor of this summer or the evening light flickering through the trees.

I am also not likely to forget the old man at the beach who completely undressed in front of Amy and me. There we were chatting about laundry, when an elderly man took off his speedo and spent five long minutes getting into his underpants. I learned a few things about age and the human body that day. Things I had only suspected, but thought I would not witness for decades. Nature is not kind to the elderly butt. Nature wrinkles the cheeks and well, I don't want to really tell you what nature does to the testes. You'll have to trust me when I say that nature and gravity are a nasty pair.

In spite of the magic of summer, some things never change and it was the smell of decomposition coming from my basement which so clearly exemplified this truth. Last week I made my way down to my scary basement and smelled something which I have previously only associated with the death of baby birds in my bathroom vent. By no small miracle David was home for this animal related misery and so I demanded that he go to the basement and find the source of the odor. He appeared after a few minutes with a completely desiccated mouse. He was happy with his find because it was neither stinky nor maggoty. I was unhappy because I knew that we had not yet found the source of the smell.

So convinced was I that there was another corpse to be found that I hunted around and sure enough, I found a very freshly killed mouse. It was in the early stages of decomposition. It was not maggot infested yet, but it was surely on its way. David kindly disposed of the mouse and I felt a peace and satisfaction which was doomed to be short lived.

Last week while in the basement to do laundry I was startled by a sudden movement at my feet. I screamed in spite of myself, sure that I was about to find a pile of baby rats under the sink. Instead I found something which surprised even me. There was a toad in my basement. How the toad got in, I do not know. He was alive, so at least he did not smell. I scooped him up, took him outside and gave him a very stern talking to.

Yesterday was my birthday so I did what any other 39 year old housewife would do. I went junking with Amy and we had nachos for lunch. The nachos were perfect. They were crisp and warm and the cheese was hot and melty. Nachos are perfect food, and very soothing if you are entering your 39th year and have had a summer filled with ant infestations and dead animals in your basement.

To those you you who still stop back here hoping for a post, I will try to do better. I appreciate your time, your comments and your gentle nudges to write.

I am getting weird...

I started writing a long post about the fun I had poisoning some intrepid ants who made their way onto my porch today.

Part way through the post I realized that my obsession with ant killing is getting weird and is most likely a symptom of not spending enough time with grownups.

It's hard when David is away in the summer because the days are so damn long. In the winter we can eat at 5:30 and have a bath by 6 and there is nothing strange about that at all. It's dark so it must be night. It is perfectly normal to take a bath and tuck into bed at night. Now I push dinner until six and then sit around waiting for night to fall.

This situation became too boring to tolerate tonight, so at 7:15 I asked the kids if they wanted to go to the mall. They jumped at the chance!

The object which we were shopping for has become the holy grail of children's sleepwear. Lily wants a silky nightgown. Something loose with a bit of give- something exactly like the nightgowns I like to wear. I have looked everywhere.

She's been wearing one of my short nightgowns with the straps knotted up at the top.  She loves it but I was kind of hoping to find something that fit her better. Macy's was our last place to look and once again, we found nothing.

We cut back through Forever 21 which I quite loved. If I had a wee bit of money to burn I'd buy a few things that look exactly like the pieces at Anthropologie, but I would not have to mortgage my house to buy them.

So that's my day. I killed ants and went to the mall. Just try to top that!

Good news and bad news...

Regular readers might remember that the two previous summers of my life were marked by the deaths of infant birds in the exhaust vent of my bathroom. It would start with the smell, continue on with the flies and then I'd cook the rotting corpse by running the bathroom heater for 24 hours a day. It was great fun each time it happened.

This fall we thought we'd be very clever and have the entire vent covered in mesh wire. No birds, no maggots. Win!

Well, at lest  it seemed like a win at the time and indeed, until Thursday it was. Thursday while out urging my dogs to piddle already, I noticed big black ants crawling up the side of my house and on the drain pipe which leads to the roof of the former bird death trap. I thought, "Huh. Ants."

That's as far as I went with that thought, because people? I did not want to know.

As a matter of fact on Facebook (If we are not facebook friends we should be- follow the button at the top.) I posted: There are ants crawling on my house. What does this mean? Feel free to lie to me. 


I went to bed Thursday night determined to ignore what was now becoming a gnawing concern. I woke up Friday morning blissfully unaware of the army of heave-ho's moving in.

I got into the shower. I found that I was not alone in the shower. There were two ants in the shower with me and I think we can agree that this is not the sort of shower company a girl wants. I slugged them a bottle of shampoo and tried not to panic. A coincidence! It was just a coincidence. The rest of the house would be ant free!!

That was the lie I told myself until I got downstairs and saw dozens of ants on the walls, the windows and the floor. First I panicked and called my husband who is conveniently away for six weeks.

"Come home right now!" I demanded. "There are ants everywhere and I am freaking out!"

Reader, he did not come home.

I did the only thing a defenseless housewife could do. I went to the hardware store and got enough ant traps to kill every ant in my town. I set them all over the house and tried to comfort the children.

"We want to move!" cried Rebecca.

"Who would want to buy our ant filled house?" I wailed back.

We spent the day out of the house, leaving the ants to have at their poison. Saturday morning there were fewer ants, but enough to have me worried that the traps weren't working. Sunday morning we only saw three and then this morning I saw one- and nothing since.

I think I won the battle. I imagine somewhere in the hot dry earth around my house is a bunker of insect death. A pile of ants defeated by $50 worth of ant poison. I miss winter already.