What Would You Do?

I just downloaded the new and revised Book of Questions to my nook.  Question number two stopped me in my tracks.  It goes like this:  "What would you do if your 6-year-old daughter's favorite toy, a talking doll, started trying to convincer that she needed a new friend - the next doll in the company's line?

When I was a little girl, I had a doll named Drowsy (image from pinterest.com) as seen here on the left.  When you pulled the string in her back, she talked. No, that's not remotely accurate. When you pulled the string on her back, she whined.  "I'm sleepy."  "I want a drink of water."  She annoyed the crap out of my father.

Now, my father was very interested in how things work.  I had a lot of those pull the string and they talk dolls and as little kids do, I pulled the string and made them talk.  I had Mrs. Beasly from Family Affair, who I later learned was voiced by Cheryl Ladd.  The Mrs. Beasly on the television show didn't speak, but Buffy, the little girl who owned and loved her, would put the doll to her ear and advise as to Mrs. Beasly's wisdom.  But, I digress.  If you are at all familiar  with the string pulling dolls (Think Woody from Toy Story, "Thar's a snake in ma boot!"), you know that all that string pulling and that very old school apparatus sewn into the doll have a limited life span, at least as far as sensible speech goes.  

When my talking dolls started to skip or get a little possessed sounding, my father would perform his standard voiceboxectomy.  My mom would carefully cut the fabric so that she could sew the doll back together when he was through and my dad would remove the voice box apparatus from the doll.  I don't remember what he did with them after that. I mean, I know he didn't save them like serial killer trophies or anything. I don't remember if he started out actually trying to repair them, or just figured that they were weird and broken and removed them for the sanity of everyone in the house.  I know that none of them ever made it back into a doll.  My mom sewed them up perfectly and I don't recall being traumatized by all that doll surgery.  The only doll that he didn't wait for to skip was Drowsy. She was so annoying that, even though her string pulled voice box was in perfect working order, he removed it anyway.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I still have my Raggedy Ann doll in my spare bedroom. I was careful for the almost 40 years that I've owned it, to not overly pull the string.  To this day she can clearly tell you, "My name is Raggedy Ann," "My friend is Raggedy Andy," and "See my candy heart".  She shares a place with the Holly Hobby doll my mother made by hand and is pretty darn perfect, but never spoke.

What I found on the internets this morning

• The 32 Smartest People on You Tube according to Buzz Feed.
• Buzz Feed also has the 22 Best ways to eat Peeps.  I want to make almost all of these.  And, why don't they sell them in a rainbow of hues in one package? It would be so much easier for me to pick.
• Just have to shake my head at this one.  It's Miley Cyrus (bleagh), dressed in a unicorn onesie, twerkig.  Why? 

• Over at Flavorwire they're showing Dramatic Photos of Fallen Fairytale Princesses. Yikes!

That's all for the moment. I'll be back soon with more tales.

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The Mice Capades

The saga continues.  After the night of the original phone call from my aunt she spent the next five nights sleeping at my house.  She kept claiming that she was intruding and that she'd understand if she was no longer welcome, but that made no sense to me.  I have extra rooms and I'm happy to loan them out to anyone who wants/needs the use of them.  Aunt Carolanne was, and can forever, continue to be a welcome guest in my house.

Anyway,  here's what happened next.  On Friday morning, Uncle Cam got home from his business trip and got to be surprised by the glue traps set up on his kitchen counters.  One of them had some fur and dirty smearing on it, was tipped over and chewed through.  He called the original exterminator from the day before, a friend who was an exterminator and he and his business associate who gave him a ride home from the airport all got manly and decided to work on the problem.  The original exterminator, who swore that it had to be a mouse the day before, now was sure that it couldn't be.  Of course, this probably had  more to do with his plot to catch the thing failing than any evidence to the contrary.  He doubled up the glue traps and said he'd come back with different stuff.  So, his solution was to put traps side by side to prevent the mouse from flipping over with the trap and managing to chew his way free.  Maybe he hoped it would make itself into a little glue trap sandwich.  My uncle went out and got super duper traps that were supposed to stick better.

That night, even with my uncle home, my aunt refused to sleep at the house.  They got to my house late Friday night and she got ready for bed. First, she insisted on making sure any rug fuzzes were not mouse droppings and that there weren't any in the guest room bed sheets.  I, personally think we're safe from a mouse problem. We've got a lot of hawks flying over our house all the time. Those little buggers would get picked off as soon as they darted toward the building.  And, we have no trees for cover.

Saturday, they pulled out the stove, but found nothing and they set up cage traps and some claw traps.  Now, I'm just imagining the house to be filled with traps. There is peanut butter scented poison bait tossed behind every appliance and anywhere a critter can get to it, but not out in the open.  There are glue traps set up on both sides of the oven and sink on the kitchen counter and by all of the doors.  There are french doors off the kitchen and the front door and that door that goes from the family to the play room and the one from the play room to the garage.  The original exterminator added a couple of claw traps filled with some kind of rodent pheromone and two metal cage traps with bowls of peanut butter in them.

Sunday morning, Aunt Carolanne goes home and checks her traps. There are no mice in the traps. The door to one of the cage traps snapped, but there's nothing in it. The other cage trap did not snap, but the bowl of peanut butter has been licked clean.    Sunday night she plans to stay at home.  I tell her that she is always welcome here and her room is ready for her, but she's sleeping in her own bed.  She pulls out the bed and looks behind and under it with a flashlight.  She checks the bathroom, the closets and behind all the furniture. She strips the bed and checks between and under mattresses, lifting even the boxspring and removing the dust ruffle.  Then, satisfied that her bedroom is mouse free, she puts it all back together.  I was checking my phone and trying to keep an eye out for her call, but by the time I went upstairs Sunday night, I'd heard nothing from her.  I was tucked in bed, reading a book when Mickey said I think your phone is buzzing. Sure enough, I'd somehow turned off the sound and it was my uncle, telling me that my aunt was at my front door and could I please let her in.  I found her standing on my porch in the dark with her pillows under one arm and her bag in the other.  She had really tried, but she just couldn't do it.

Monday morning, she was off again.  She informed my uncle that they would both be taking the day off from work.  So, they emptied everything out of the kitchen. Threw away everything they could, disinfected anything a mouse could have touched and washed and boxed up everything in the cabinets.  Now, the issue became, if the mouse eats the poison bait and then dies behind, in or under her cabinets, she wants them empty so that his dead mouseness can't get near her stuff and they can find him and get him out right away.  Monday night, I call to see how it went and offer our house again. She accepts, but seems to feel like I'm being put out somehow, which I'm not and I assure her of that.   Before she left she put jellybeans out again and made a point of making a kind of code to see if any are gone. She put 14 each of one color on the very top of the bowls. One bowl went on the counter, the scene of the original crime and was surrounded by glue traps.  The other bowl was on the ground, surrounded by glue traps.

 

Tuesday morning, the report was in that the mouse had eaten some, but not all of the jellybeans. Not very many, but enough that the secret bean code made it obvious.  No mice were on any traps.  My uncle is sent out to purchase good old fashioned snap traps. The kind my grandfather swore by. He put a piece of salami and some peanut butter on it to lure the mouse and make it tug and set off the trap.  They salami and PB'd them up and set them out.  When the mouse managed to eat all of the peanut butter from the big cage trap, the exterminator was convinced it was a mouse again.  He took his big traps away.  By now the smell of peanut butter has permeated the entire first floor of the house. My uncle wants to put jelly beans on the glue traps.  It sounds like a good idea to me, but it doesn't happen.

So, now we are another few days out. Aunt Carolanne has been sleeping at home for the last couple of nights and she is just waiting for the smell of decaying mouse to make itself known.  She's already lined up a guy who makes a living tracking the smell of small dead things hidden in your house and gets rid of them.  At this point, she's  no longer dreading the smell of dead critter. She knows it will at least be an answer to her ongoing mystery.  There's no good mouse, but a dead mouse.  Even if he's all smelly.

Just Yikes!

My aunt calls me tonight.  The conversation goes something like this.

Me:  Hi Aunt Carolanne.

AC:  JoanneMarie, I'm glad I reached you.  What's new over there? Is it just you and Mickey?

Me:  Yeah, what's up?

AC:  I'm going over Louise's because I have no where to sleep tonight and I just thought that you might want me to come stay over at your house.

Me:  Of course you can sleep here, you are always welcome here.  Wait!  Why don't you have anywhere to sleep tonight?

AC:  Something ate all of my jellybeans last night.

Me:  Okaaaaay.  Wait. What?!!?

AC:  Last night I poured a bowl full of jellybeans and put it on the counter and went to bed and when I woke up they were all gone.  Now my house if full of poison and mousetraps.

So, I assured her  that our guest room was available to her and that she could come any time.  But, she was worried that cousin Louise would be disappointed if she didn't stay over there.  She was going to figure out what she wanted to do and she'd call back and let me know.

While waiting to find out what she decided to do, I filled Mickey in on the situation.  He figured that she couldn't have possibly filled a bowl with jellybeans and they just disappeared. She must have forgotten to do it, but forgot and then thought she had done it. I told him that as far as I could figure, you'd need a little fire line of mice passing the beans one at a time to each other down the line and off to wherever they came from.  Mickey wondered if maybe Aunt Carolanne sleep walked, or if Uncle Camillo had eaten them.  But, she only said that she had no where to sleep, which meant that he had to be away on business.

When Aunt Carolanne called back, I got to try our new line of questioning.

Me:  Are you sure you put the jelly beans in the bowl?

AC:  Yes.  Since Cam is away, Louise was going to come over tonight and she always has a bowl of candy at her house. I had off from work yesterday and I went to the store and picked up some stuff and cleaned the house. Last night I put the few bananas I bought on the counter in the kitchen, near the double doors to the deck.  There's also a candle there.  I took out a bowl and poured the whole bag of jellybeans into the bowl.  It was really full and I did eat a few of them, but the bowl was stilled all the way filled, just not spilling over. I shifted the bowl and the candle on the counter a few times.  I went to bed after 11 o'clock and that bowl was completely filled with candy.  This morning when I went downstairs the bowl was completely empty. Not one single jellybean in it.

Me:  Are you taking Ambien or anything like that?

AC:  You are the third person to ask me that today!

Me:  Well,  they say people who take that sleep- eat and sleep- drive.  Is it possible you went downstairs at night to eat them?

AC:  I asked myself that , but I've never done it before.  I have to keep explaining it to everyone so they know I'm not just crazy.  the bowl was filled last night and was completely empty this morning. I thought someone came in the house while I was asleep and ate all the jellybeans, but that doesn't make sense. Now, I'm not sure which is more disturbing, that someone came in or something.

Me:  It just seems crazy that a tiny little mouse managed to take every bean out of the bowl and leave no trace. Was the bowl disturbed? Not a single piece of candy on the floor?  Nothing?

AC:  No, the bowl was exactly where it was. The bananas weren't touched. Every single jelly bean was gone. That's 175 jellybeans, because I bought another bag today and that's how many are in it.  This morning, I saw it, gasped and then I got ready so fast, grabbed my stuff and got out of here. All I could think was that the mouse should have gone to sleep in his nest after he spent the whole night running back and forth hiding those jellybeans, but instead, he's all hopped up on the sugar and going nuts. I couldn't stay in the house.

It turns out that she called a handyman from the driveway, after she evacuated the house as quickly as she could. He couldn't make it there until tomorrow. So, she called an exterminator and he went this afternoon.  At first he said he couldn't imagine a mouse doing all of that. Later he said he saw a video of a mouse that systematically emptied a bowl/plate/dish of something, one piece at a  time, over the course of a night. He filled every nook and cranny in the house (after my aunt has spent the last 25 plus years filling every tiny crack she's ever seen with steel wool and some kind of mouse preventive powder before she caulked them closed) with peanut butter flavored poison cubes. Now, she's afraid it will just attract more mice.

I'm afraid of what this mouse will look like. I'm picturing human looking hands and, well, now he's got to be morbidly obese. He ate three/four times his weight in jellybeans last night.

Yikes!  Just yikes!

The Bait and Tackle Shop

It was another Friday night in the sun room, drinking summery drinks and getting silly while we enjoyed the glow of the palm tree and flames licking up in the fireplace.  Now, the sun room is 3 walls that are mostly window and one wall that's, well, wall.  There were a lot of nails to hang things, but all pretty low on the one, the only wall from when we moved in.  Mickey had an old girlfriend who must have really gotten into Americana, because he hung some little flaggy thing on every nail. He admired his handiwork, informing me how pleased he was, because it looked just like a gift shop.

I don't collect anything I have to dust or clean. I just plain refuse. Yes, I collect books. Now, that my bookshelves and all the extra new bookshelves in the new house are filled to the brim, I collect nook books. I really never have to dust them!  Okay, I have two walls of our coat closet have bags displayed on them. But, these are useful things, so I don't think they count.

Little by little, we've been switching over from the Americana.   The sun room looks out at the pool area and our pretty patio with the outdoor kitchen and I love all of that. I had a box of my mom's old stuff and she was decorating with a lot of palm trees and lighthouses.  Mickey started putting the lighthouses on the tables and the high window ledges of the room.  A few framed pictures, of lighthouses and other seashore like designs got hung up there as well.  Lately we added a painted seashell I got in Wildwood and a Palm tree ornament he picked up for me.  

As we are sitting enjoying the ambiance of our happy cozy little sun room, Mickey looks around and suggests that we hand crab and lobster traps, maybe some fishnets in the room.  As I look at him like he's grown a second head, he says, "it'll be just like a bait and tackle shop."  Now, that's how he refers to it.  I told him that I draw the line at worms!

In his defense, he loves my mermaid painting and  it is now framed and displayed in the sun room. 

In My Next Life...

This morning, in an email from BBC America there was an article about the most British names for celebrities and it was awesome! You can find it here.  Do not skip the comments. There are so many more awesomely wonderfully British names in it! Of course, the number one name is Benedict Cumberbatch. I swear, I could walk around all day just chanting that name.  If I could find my ex-husband, I would tell him that when he hits his next identity crisis, he should totally change his name to Cumberbatch.  I'd even consider remarrying him (albeit incredibly briefly) just to take the name.

Of course, being all about the having of cake AND eating of same, I would not for a second consider leaving my sexy Latin lover, Francisco! I'd marry him in an instant and do it for keepsies!!

Mickey and Jammie: Under the Influence

Under the Influence

So, Mickey and I were having our Friday night Happy Hour, enjoying the snow falling in our sun room. The room was mostly dark, with the only light coming from the fireplace, the palm tree and the back patio light to show the snowfall.  We were drinking summery drinks to fool ourselves about the outside temperature and, as usual, we were getting kind of silly.

Mickey had lasik vision correction surgery a couple of weeks ago and he's not only getting used to being able to see far ( he only wore his glasses at night for driving and to watch tv), he has to get used to not being able to see as well up close.  He's been on a reading glasses mission, trying to find the right quantity, style, placement around the house and magnification. We got into a discussion about reading glasses and bifocals, etc.  It started fairly normally, for that conversation, and then it got weird, as many episodes of the Mickey and Jammie show do.

Mickey insists to people that I wear bifocal contact lenses, which don't actually exist. No matter how many times I explain multifocal lenses and monovision correction, and all the other things I, quietly, use to see the best I possibly can, he goes around making loud declarations about bifocal contact lenses.  No one really cares about the correct details, so I just nod and smile and let him say whatever.  But, at home, alone, we tend to have more detailed conversations.

Mickey:  Are your glasses bifocals?
Jam:  No. They are single vision?  The difference is too small to bother with bifocals.  I just slide them down my nose when I need to see better up close.
Mickey:  How does that work?
Jam:  My glasses prescription is different from my contact lens prescription because of  the distance between the lens and my eyeball.  So, I can kind of change the way I see by adjusting my glasses.  I'll be fine this way... until I run out of nose, I guess.  Then, the eye doctor will have to write a prescription for bifocals, I  guess.
Mickey:  You could always get a nose job.