I am not going to  complain about the cold.

I am not going to complain because this past summer, back when I was complaining about the heat, I promised that if it ever stopped being  hot I would never complain about the cold again. And I figure the least I can do is honor that promise until I suffer through a week of winter in *Undisclosed Eastern European Country*.

So no, I will not complain. I embrace Winter, in all her splendor.   And to express the depth of my affections toward her icy charms, I give you an homage to a winter’s night….

Crispy, crackly skin
My fingers look like pork skins
Need humidity

Woosh, the heater starts
Sound of money being sucked
From our bank account

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered cold and weary,
Over many a large and sickening volume of Weather Channel lore,
While I shivered, too cold for napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`’Tis my teeth,’ I muttered, `chattering till my jaws are sore-
Only this, and nothing more.’

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
Summer now a dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; – vainly I had sought to borrow
From my Visa, to my sorrow – sorrow for they want some more-
More rare and precious money else we’ll freeze  unto our core-
Propane bills for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of my dried out skin
Thrilled me – filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the chattering of my teeth, I stood repeating
`’Tis some lotion in my cabinet, or maybe in the bathroom drawer -
Some Vaseline, Eucerin, or Aquaphor; -
No, only chapstick, and nothing more,’

Back into the chamber sneezing, all my soul within me freezing,
Soon again my teeth were chattering somewhat louder than before.
`Surely,’ said I, `surely there is someone on the Weather Channel;
Let me see then, what the forecast is, and this mystery explore -
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
‘Tis the forecast, nothing more!’

On I turned the television, with stealth and much precision,
And there appeared a portly weatherman of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched beside my chamber door -
Perched upon the 27″ Panasonic  beside my chamber door -
Perched, and smiled, and nothing more.

Then this weatherman beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy face be shorn and shaven, thou,’ I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim  meteorologist wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me  when will pass the Night’s Antarctic shore!’
Quoth the weatherman, `Nevermore.’

`Prophet!’ said I, `thing of evil! – prophet still, if man or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this frozen land enchanted -
On this home by coldness haunted – tell me truly, I implore -
Is there – is there warmth in Gilead? – tell me – tell me, I implore!’
Quoth the weatherman, `Nevermore.’

Sirens are generally not a good thing.

Around here, a siren usually means I forgot that I was heating oil on the stove while I ran to put the towels in the dryer…and check facebook…and read a few pages of Good Housekeeping. Luckily, it hasn’t ever gotten further than the smoke alarm sirens– the ones that the mostly-useless-electricians put in that just make a lot of noise, not the ones from the security company that immediately call the fire department. The fact that the immediately-call-the-fire-department ones have never gone off greatly decreases my feeling of fire-safetyishness, truth be told.

But today, the siren meant something different. Today, the siren meant that I had rolled through the stop sign on my little, backwoods, rural, middle-of-nowhere, don’t-nobody-else-stop-neither road, and that said rolling had not gone unnoticed.

Sometimes, a siren going off around here means that the kids, history buffs that they are, have re-enacted the Battle of the Alamo, using bubble wrap to mimic the sound of gunfire. I don’t know about gunfire, but our alarm system thinks bubble wrap sounds an awful lot like breaking glass. And our glass-break detector actually does immediately call the police department.

Of course, because we live in a little, backwoods, rural, middle-of-nowhere kind of place, it takes the police 30 minutes to arrive at our front door to investigate whether we have been chopped up into small, unidentifiable pieces by serial killers. There are never any police cars on patrol where we live (if you happen to be a crazed criminal, you should know that we have two vicious attack dogs and one very aggressive llama, and we are armed with awesome guns, and we are trained in the art of fujitsu. Unless fujitsu is some sort of camera, in which case we are trained in something else that will allow us to separate important parts of your body from one another using only our toes. Who needs police when you can disembowel people with your toes?).

In the entire 6 years I have lived here, I have seen no more 5 police cars. Or maybe I’ve seen one police car, but I’ve seen it 5 different times. In any event, encounters with law enforcement are sufficiently rare as to have instilled a sense of confidence in the denizens of our particular nowheresville: specifically, people don’t stop at stop signs. Some of them don’t even slow down.

Myself, I’m a stopper. Not only that, I have been known to point and wag my finger at the non-stoppers, or at least at the drive-right-through-at-35-mph-ers.  And I can do that in all my well-deserved self-righteousness, because I am a stopper.

Or so I thought….

Yesterday afternoon, any delusions I held regarding my standing as a keeper-of-the-code-as-it-applies-to-stopping-for-a-full-three-second-count-at-all-stop-signs were shattered.

See, when I woke up yesterday, I had every intention of leaving the house to take Mason to go get his bloodwork done first thing in the morning. I don’t know why it takes us 4 hours to get out of the house in the morning. So we left the house on our way to the lab at the crack of 11:20.

At about 11:35, I remembered that the road was under construction. It was the orange-and-white-striped barricades that  jogged my memory. You would think I would have remembered sooner—miles and miles sooner, as in, before-it-was-too-late-to-take-an-alternate-route sooner, especially in light of the fact that these same barricades sucked a sock up my vacuum cleaner on the way to my girls’-night-out viewing of White Christmas on the big screen with one of my besties only a few nights earlier.

Even with the diversion, we arrived at the lab-o-trauma at 11:42, a full 18 minutes before they close for lunch. Which would have been a tremendous victory, had there not been a sign declaring “We’ve Moved!” on the door.

Mason really doesn’t like being strapped into a car seat. And the only thing more injurious to his happy mood than being buckled in is having to be buckled in again after having finally enjoyed a brief taste of freedom.

Four kids back in the car, buckled, one frustrated round of, “What do you mean, you’re not buckled? What have you been doing for the last 3 minutes?”, and we’re on our way to the lab-o-trauma’s new location, which happens to be smack-dab in the middle of the construction zone we’d just detoured around. Which probably explains why I drove right by it, then had to make a rather awkward T-intersection U-turn. It might also explain why we found ourselves driving on the wrong side of the pylons, into the path of an oncoming 18-wheeler. Luckily, Riley notices things like oncoming 18-wheelers that might escape the notice of someone who’s squinting out the window, mumbling “Where is it? It’s gotta be one of these buildings….”

In spite of our little unscheduled adventure, we arrived at 11:54, a full 6 minutes before they close for lunch. I’m not sure what time the other 15 people who were already in the waiting room arrived, but they did not look amused to see our rowdy party-of-five enter.

That place should really hire a second phlebotomist.

Mason doesn’t sit. Did you know that? It’s probably pretty apparent from most of my posts.

So, for the next hour-and-five-minutes, I did my best to keep the 35-pound-ferret corralled on a 2-person bench. I read magazines (Luckily, Better Homes and Gardens has lots of pictures of dogs and cats this month), I played several hundred rounds of “Kiss-me-right-here….you missed! Again?”, and sang Somewhere over the Rainbow, Fly Me To The Moon, and the ABC song…repeatedly. I let Mason practice his hairdressing skills (until he attempted to remove large sections of hair using his thumb and forefinger), and offered my body up as a giant jungle-gym. And I did it with a smile on my face, and while admonishing certain other family members to keep the peace, stop kicking each other, and get their own gum.

Finally, at 1:00, the poor-phlebotomist-who-worked-through-her-entire-lunch-hour called us back to the torture chamber. Now, Mason has an uncanny memory, but maybe the new office threw him. He recognized her as someone he liked, and he immediately turned on the charm. Even as she tied the blue-rubber band around his upper arm, he smiled and flirted. It wasn’t until the needle physically pierced his skin that the look of recognition swept across his face.  But he’s a tough one, and even as she was putting on the bandage and apologizing profusely, he was doing his best to smile at her through his tears.

By the time we stepped across the lab threshold, Mason was fully recovered. Mommy, on the other hand, could think of little other than a session with Dr. Merl Ot. And I still had Wail-Mart, SuperTorture, and KroGrrr on my to-do list.

Every once in a while, a rare glimmer of sanity peeks through the otherwise impenetrable wall of my incompetence. This was such a time. Rather than drag all four children around town to run errands, I drove 20 minutes home and dropped them off to The Hubby, armed with all the sympathy-rousing-patheticatude I could muster, then proceeded to make the 20 minute drive back to town.

It was shortly into my proceeding that I heard the siren.

Now, if you know me, you no doubt know that I can’t do things in any way that could be deemed ordinary. It’s not that I don’t, as if I’m striving for some sort of zenith (or nadir– depends on your perspective I guess…) of eccentricity. It’s that I can’t.

So it may come as no surprise to you to hear that I was pulled over not by a police car, or a sherriff, or even a county constable…but, by a Texas Wildlife Officer.

The answer to your question is, “Yes, evidently they can.”

Since it is already November twenty-somethingth and I have yet to do an “I’m thankful for” post, let me take this opportunity to say that I am thankful that the Texas Wildlife Officer let me go with a verbal warning.

I will close with a dramatic re-enactment of the incident, which may or may not offer a glimpse of why the Officer didn’t detain me to write a ticket:

Me: Hello, Officer.

Texas Wildlife Officer: Ma’am, I stopped you today because you ran that stop sign back there. And you didn’t just run it, you ran it fast. Is there any particular reason you did that, ma’am? Anything going on that would have caused you to not just run that stop sign, but to run it as fast as you did?”

Me: Well, officer, it all started because I had to take my 5-year old to get bloodwork done….

You would think that by the ripe-old-age of 42, you would have learned most everything. Not so. I find that every day offers myriad opportunities for the acquisition of new and profound knowledge.

Why, take the amazing collection of wisdom I collected today, for example:

1. When you’re kneeling on the back-seat platform of a Suburban to buckle the back seat passengers into their carseats, if you sit back on your feet you might find that your Croc flip-flops are full of evil demon stickers.
2. It is hard to pull evil demon stickers from your hindquarters by yourself.
3. When you’re sitting outside in the complete darkness, enjoying the chill air, enthralled by the music of the crickets and frogs, the sound of a bedroom window being slid shut sounds exactly like the hiss of a deadly, venomous pit viper.
4. I run fast.
5. I am suprisingly agile for a 42 year old.
6. Husbands will laugh at you while you’re recovering from thinking you were about to be attacked by a deadly, venomous pit viper.
7. Mason would like you to know that he, too, learned something new today, having picked up a new vocabulary from Mommy over dinner preparations.
8. And lastly, I also learned that my pasta strainer is much too small for an entire pot of spaghetti, which results in boiling water overflowing the sides and removing the skin from any appendages that might be, say, holding on to said strainer.

Those last two might seem to be unrelated, but if you read through them again….

It’s been a long time since I last blogged. I know this because my last post was about my near-death experience giving birth to Mason, which was in honor of his birthday…seven weeks ago….

If I hadn’t remembered that fact, my absence still would have been apparent by the fact that I couldn’t remember my username. Or my password . Okay, I admit it: I couldn’t remember my blog URL. Happy now?

And why do I even bother to check the little box that says “Remember me”? It never does.

                  Blog: Password? 
                  Me: Hi, remember me? I made you? 
                  Blog: Password?
                  Me: Blog, I am your mother.
                  Blog: Password?

My failure to compose hasn’t been for lack of chaos. There’s been lots of chaos. Abundant chaos. Chaos overflowing like 6-people’s worth of laundry out of a pitiful wicker laundry basket. The problem is that either A) I get sidetracked by more chaos on my way to document the chaos that already happened, B) I compose a pithy blogpost in my mind, somebody interrupts my train of thought by asking why I’m talking to myself, and I forget that I was even thinking, or C)…um… I’m pretty sure I had a “C” when I started this list, but I have no idea what it was….

The other major stumbling block has been the fact that my blog and I have this agreement that I won’t turn it into a forum for pointless ravings and rantings, and it will remember me if I check the box that says, “Remember me”. Only one of us is keeping our end of the bargain. But if you nice people are going to spend ten minutes of your time vicariously experiencing gross ineptitude  through my leopard-spotted reading glasses, then I feel I should at least thank you by wrapping it up into a neat little package and tie it with a bow.  If you’re going to be so kind as to hop on my train, I should get you somewhere, right? But making sense out of chaos is no easy task, and so I’ve chosen the path of avoidance.

Now, it’s probably obvious by now that I’m back on track, sitting at my computer typing, and ready to share with you a glimpse of the chaos. Obvious, yes, but also dead wrong. When I sat down, I had high hopes of telling you how the two older kids and I spent our day walking up and down one of the busiest-yet-least-interesting streets in town while my Suburban was having the a/c replaced, and how we ate Sno Cones at Bahama Bucks and the toilet is so high off the ground that our feet dangled (one of us who is not me actually had to get off the toilet by falling into a fake plant). But for the life of me, I can’t think of any way to make a freakishly-high commode relevant.

But I did get this really funny email today, courtesy of my writing buddy Helen Hanson (HelenHanson.com), to whom I owe an email regarding her generous offer for me to participate in a new blogging endeavor. See? I’m not even composing email these days. Anyway, for lack of anything better to share with you, I’m going to share half of this funny email with you. I’m saving the other half in case I’m still deep in avoidance next week.

You probably shouldn’t drink anything hot and/or fizzy while you read this, unless you enjoy having hot and/or fizzy liquid come out your nose.

A paraprosdokian (from the Greek meaning “beyond” and “expectation”) is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax . For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists. Some paraprosdokians not only change the meaning of an early phrase, but also play on the double meaning of a particular word, creating a syllepsis.

I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.

Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.

Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it’s still on the list.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

If I agreed with you we’d both be wrong.

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

The early bird might get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

Evening news is where they begin with ‘Good evening’, and then proceed to tell you why it isn’t.

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station.

How is it one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?

Some people are like Slinkies … not really good for anything, but you can’t help smiling when you see one tumble down the stairs.

Dolphins are so smart that within a few weeks of captivity, they can train people to stand on the very edge of the pool and throw them fish.

I thought I wanted a career, turns out I just wanted pay checks.

A bank is a place that will lend you money, if you can prove that you don’t need it.

Whenever I fill out an application, in the part that says “If an emergency, notify:” I put “DOCTOR”.

I am all about traditions.

Take Thanksgiving, for instance. I mean, is there any other holiday so steeped in tradition as Turkey Day? I have eaten the same thing every Thanksgiving since 1968. Well, maybe since 1969. I don’t think I had teeth yet that first Thanksgiving. Although I did find a doctors note in my baby book where he recommended bacon as an appropriate first food for a 4 month old. I think it was on the same page that recommended Crisco as a sunblock. Ah, the good ol’ days….

Anyway, every Thanksgiving we have the same menu. The Hubby once asked me if I got bored eating the same meal every year. Yes, because having the same meal ONE TIME A YEAR is oh-such-a-rut….

One year I got really crazy, and changed things up by making mashed sweet potatoes instead of canned. Not only that—instead of topping them with mini-marshamallows—-I made a custard topping. I know, I am a rebel.

Since moving into the Halfway-finished House, we have developed new holiday traditions. Every year, we celebrate 4th of July at Rancho de la Roca. We spread our blanket on the lawn, I take the kids canoeing, they do some bounce-house-jumping and some snow-cone-eating, and then when darkness falls we settle back and watch the fabulous fireworks show. Afterwards, we head home for another Moreno 4th of July tradition: Daddy’s Backyard Firework Extravaganzza.

It’s generally a pretty low-key event, just me and the kids on the back porch while The Hubby sets off his wares in the pasture. There was that one last year that exploded too violently, throwing itself off The Hubby’s homemade launch stand and sending giant purple fireballs at his head. But other than that one incident, it’s pretty tame.

Until now….

Back when The Hubby and I got married—which is coming up on 20 years this September—I promised I would never let him get bored. At the time, he thought that was a good thing. He has since reminded me that there is no physical, binding document to force my compliance, and has graciously agreed to let me out of the terms of that particular arrangement. Nice try….

But really, it wasn’t my fault. I mean, it wasn’t precipitated by one of my infamous ideas or anything. The story goes like this:

We got home from Rancho de la Roca a little before 10. For some reason, Mason was scared of the fireworks this year, so rather than put him through the trauma of even more loud noises and bright lights, I went ahead and put him to bed.

I came out of his room to sheer chaos. I know—you’re shocked.

I could hear the screams of the children coming from the backyard. All three older kids were down at the chicken coop in hysterics. Ethan and Ramie were outside the coop, and Riley was inside yelling—–

—if you have a teenage daughter, you are familiar with melodrama. Now imagine a teenage girl with MY genes. Oh yeah, now you’re getting the picture….

Where was I? Oh, yeah—so, Riley is in the chicken coop, and she’s screaming, “It’s got Ethel!!! A snake has Ethel!!! It’s killing her!!! She’s not moving!!! She’s dead!!!”  Meanwhile, I come to the back door and scream back, something along the lines of, “Ethan! Get your sister OUT OF THE CHICKEN COOP NOW!!!”

Now, can I just say that if you had told me 20 years ago—10 years, even—that I would ever in my life be screaming any sentence that included the words “chicken coop,” I would have thought you were crazy. Yet, there I was, screaming for Ethan to convince Riley to get the heck out of the chicken coop.

I ran down to the coop, passing a sobbing Ramie and an exhilarated Ethan on their way up to the house. That boy thrives on some chaos. Don’t know where he gets it. Riley, meanwhile, has finally come out of the coop. She’s sobbing, too, but she’s composed enough to shine the flashlight on the far side of the chicken coop to show me where, indeed, a snake has climbed up the chicken wire among the roosting hens. And Yeti, who is decidedly not a hen, but that fact was only discovered after we’d paid for him and brought him home.

Some panic ensued here for a while. I’m not clear on all the details, but there was some confused running up and down the hill between the house and the coop, some “WHERE IS YOUR FATHER?” being shouted back and forth, some “GO TELL YOUR FATHER TO BRING THE SHOVEL,” and some ear piercing wailing courtesy of the 6 year old, who was sure Ethel was that snake’s belated 4th of July chicken picnic dinner.

I do remember grabbing the flashlight from Riley, and showing The Hubby where the snake had cozied up to the sleeping chickens. I found the snake’s head, and because I like to think myself some sort of pit viper expert (mostly just because I really like saying the words, “pit viper”), determined that he was not, in fact, a venomous snake. At least, he wasn’t a Texas venomous snake. You know, you can never really be sure that someone didn’t buy one of those exotic ultra-deadly imports, get tired of supplying it with live rats, and release it into the wild. But in the heat of the moment, I was comfortable with my assessment.

Besides, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the snake that only a few weeks before had leapt out at me as I tried to determine whether itwas venomous. If you heard that story, you will remember that the hubby didn’t wait for my answer before severing the beasts head from its body.

Now, I am not a snake hater. In fact, I really like snakes. They eat nasty rodents. Nasty rodents that invade your garage and make nests in boxes of wedding keepsakes that you have no choice but to throw away because there is no amount of sanitizing that is going to take “rodent” out of a bouquet of silk flowers. I have coffee mugs that I’ve bleached, scalded, and run through the dishwasher ten times, and I still can’t bring myself to drink out of them. I save them for company.

But a snake’s gotta know his place. Me, human. Dominion over all the animals. You, snake. Crawl on your belly on the dust of the earth. And leave my chickens alone. Genesis, right?

So I have my flashlight expertly trained (it’s an art) on the snake’s head, while The Hubby deftly pins him to the chicken wire with the shovel. Now, chicken wire isn’t really the firmest of surfaces. The snake is pinned, but The Hubby can’t really do any severing, because there’s too much give. The snake isn’t really contemplating the give factor of chicken wire; he’s just looking for something to hold on to. And it just so happens that the closest thing to him is…Ethel.

Before I knew what was happening, the wily serpent had his body wound around Ethel’s body. Ramie is watching out the back door in tears. I’m still feeling mommyguiltfrom having to put the cat down last month; no way am I going to be able to face the 6 year-old and tell her the snake killed her chicken.

So I did the only thing I could do. I grabbed the snake. Of course I did. Doesn’t that sound just like the kind of idiot thing I would do? “How’d ya get those two holes in your arm, Ashley?” “Oh…see there was this snake…” So I have a hold of the snake, and he’s coiling tighter around the chicken, and I’m worrying that my pit viper identification skills far outweigh my constrictor identification skills, and it hits me that I’m not sure which way to pull the snake. I mean, there aren’t really any directional markers on a snake, no easy way to tell “front” from “back”. Wrong way, and I’ve tightened the noose.

Now, the chickens have evidently been to the Jurassic Park T-Rex school of Snake Avoidance, because during this whole time, Ethel does…not…move. None of them do. They are still as bricks. Puffy feathered bricks. Kind of like the squirrel scene in Christmas Vacation, where Diane Ladd is laying unconscious on the floor, and Chevy Chase whispers, “Mom—don’t move!”  (Yes, I just fit two completely different movie references into one paragraph. My blog, my rules to break…).

So as I’m trying to solve the Chinese rope puzzle that is the snake, I say to The Hubby, “Whatever you do, don’t let it get away.”  To which he replies—

“TOO LATE!”

Now, I ask you: does the snake go for the guy who’s been trying to separate his spine at the base of his skull? No. He goes for the crazy woman who has ahold of the rest of his body. So the snake makes a go at me, I throw him to the ground and grab a rake—which The Hubby commandeers, because evidently my rake handling skills don’t live up to my snake handling skills—and The Hubby chops his head of with the shovel. I like to think he put extra vengeance into the act; you know, like “Take THAT, you vile viper. Try to bite my wife, will you?”

I have no pictures of the snake. So I can’t disprove The Hubby’s claim that the snake was only 4 feet long, not 6. And there is no video of the event, either, so The Hubby can’t prove I said anything stronger than, “Oh my goodness.” His word against mine….

I am directing today’s message directly to the male of the species, specifically to those who inhabit a dwelling shared with one or more females of the species.

It may have thus far escaped your notice that we women are plumbed differently than men. This difference in equipment dictates that we do not have regular occasion to lift that ring of contention known as “the toilet seat.” That’s not to say that there aren’t those among us who, at some point during our formative years, didn’t experiment just to revel in the liberation of  carrying out certain necessities of nature while standing upright. But such attempts are generally one-time occurrences, being met with varying degrees of failure  and subsequent clean-up efforts.

And coincidentally, it is the very topic of “clean-up efforts” that concerns us today. For you see, having but rare motivation to lift the seat, those of us who lack a Y chromosome are ignorant—perhaps blissfully so—of the ecosystem which from time to time lays claim to the territory below. In fact, it is generally a great shock when we do find ourselves exploring the porcelain realm of man and discover the proliferation of flora and fauna establishing their colonies like coral along the Great Barrier Reef.

While diversity of life is to be celebrated in the ocean or the rainforest, the underside of the toilet seat is a different matter entirely.

It’s called a Clorox wipe. Would it kill you to use it?

It is March. I realize that may not be a newsflash for most of you, seeing as how it’s been March for a while now. But I have to stop and think about things like what month it is. I was just wondering this morning why they don’t put a little digital calendar on vehicle dashboards. I mean, my rearview mirror tells me the temperature, which is not only useless—I mean, once I’m in my car, it’s a little late to say “oh, 34 degrees, guess I’ll be needing long sleeves and warm shoes.”—but a little mean-spirited, don’t you think? I’m already stuck in traffic and the only radio station that’s not on commercials is playing Gordon Lightfoot and I can’t reach my Santana CD because it slid down on the passenger floorboard and the baby is screaming because he wants me to hand him Curious George which wouldn’t be a problem if I was all stretchy like Mrs. Incredible and if he wanted Curious George then why the heck did he throw him in the way-back, AND you have to remind me that when I get wherever it is I’m going I’m going to be walking across the parking lot with 4 kids in 34 degrees?

But the date, now that would be helpful. Having “March 8″ displayed on my dashboard all day might allow it to sink into my subconscious—or maybe even into my conscious, although I highly doubt that—so that later on when I need to know what day it is I might just possibly be able to at least get the month right.

But I digress….

The reason that March is so significant is that The Hubby and I first met and began dating in March. At least, I think it was March. I’m fairly certain it was. It could have been February, but it would have had to be late February, because we weren’t together on Valentine’s Day. I’m almost positive it was March.

And this March marks the 24th anniversary of the date we met. Twenty-four years. Wow. That’s considerably more than half my life. Well, not considerably more. Somewhat more. A little bit more.  A smidge, really.

There’s a kind of interesting story behind how we met. And I fully intend to share it with you. Eventually. I’ve been trying to share it for days. A couple of weeks, if we’re going for accuracy here. But every time I try to sit down to the keyboard, someone throws up, or walks in with an eye full of goop that needs to be cleaned, or I go to get Mason up from his nap and realize that he’s nowhere near over his stomach virus. My absolute first priority has been working on the adoption fundraising, but I really haven’t gotten much accomplished, because I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time wheedling and cajoling a certain 10 year-old moppy-headed boy to take his medicine. And once everyone settles down, there’s the growing pile of  laundry that inevitably follows any plague outbreak.

So I still hope to share the story of how The Hubby and I met before our anniversary month is over. Seriously. Eventually….

I had planned to do it yesterday. Actually, that’s not true. I had planned on spending the day with my manuscript, seeing as how last night was my writers’ guild meeting and I hadn’t picked out a scene to bring for critique. In fact, according to my word-processing program, I haven’t touched the electronic version since January 10. Whew—good thing I’d have an entire day to work on it. Then I realized that we were going to the zoo, and “going to the zoo” and “sitting at my kitchen table reviewing my manuscript” are pretty much mutually exclusive.

So, the zoo it was. Now, it is worth mentioning that not only is it Spring Break—and we home schoolers know to avoid public places during spring break—-but yesterday was 1/2 price day at the Zoo. Unfortunately, sometimes having two in public school and two in home school means that you have the worst of both worlds—especially when it comes to taking weekday field trips during the school year. And with the adoption costs looming over our heads, I am loathe to let go of any money on non-essentials, so there is no way I can justify spending $52 to go to the zoo on a full-price day. The only way I let myself talk me into going on 1/2 price day was by reminding myself that we have asked the kids to sacrifice our yearly vacation to visit grandparents and cousins and hang out on the beach—the highlight of any non-Disney year—-so that we can put that money towards saving this little child.

So I decided that if we left early enough, the crowds wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, I figured “early enough” meant “in time to arrive about the time the zoo opens.” In reality, “early enough” was probably about an hour before opening. But I didn’t know that at the time, so we’ll discuss it later, when it fits into the whole storyline.

I already had our food prepared, clothes picked out—hey, for me, that’s some monumental preparedness. Like, Boy Scout caliber preparedness. I got the kids up—–now, in retrospect, this is where things started to go wrong. The child who takes twice as long to do anything—no, three times as long—-didn’t get out of bed when we told him to. This is coincidentally the child that invariably causes some sort of chaos and discord just as everyone else is walking out the door. There is always a grimace, or a moan, or some sort of melodramatic outburst intended to elicit “Oh, gee—whatever is the matter” from the other residents of MoTopia. Either his only pair of clean jeans isn’t comfortable (since-forever-I-have-always-hated-these-jeans-I’ve-told-you-a-thousand-times-I-hate-them), or he can’t find his shoes and yes he put them back on the shoe shelf someone else must have moved them and it doesn’t matter that nobody else has a motive for moving them—–I mean which one of us would want to move his shoes KNOWING what trauma it would inflict on the entire family?—- or oops he forgot to go to the bathroom when he woke up so now we’re all going to end up sitting down and waiting for 15 minutes because for some reason this kid can’t take care of business in less than 15 minutes….you get the picture. And for the record, all of those things happened yesterday morning, plus a few more.

So, finally we got in the car—only 10 minutes behind schedule—and headed to the zoo. Now, I knew the zoo would be crowded. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Spring Break + 1/2 price admission = catastrophe.  But hey—we’d be there around the time the zoo opened. It would be all those losers that showed up an hour AFTER opening who would suffer.

Five miles from our exit, the electronic TxDOT sign over the highway declared, “Expect delays at University exit.”

Guess what exit goes to the zoo….

No, not AT the exit, by the way, but three miles BEFORE the exit, traffic slowed to a crawl, and the two right lanes froze.  And the traffic remained sloth-slow all…the…way…to…the…zoo.

I think we parked in a neighboring city. We hiked 20 minutes to the zoo entrance behind an elderly couple who were all lovey-dovey and wanted to walk side-by-side. I hope The Hubby and I are still all lovey-dovey at that age. I also hope we are cognizent enough of our surroundings to walk single file on narrow pathways. The first chance we had to veer off, we did, beating the crowd to the entrance plaza where we joined about 25,000 other people waiting to get tickets. Funny thing about 1/2 price day during spring break—-families with one or two kids, they figure the savings isn’t worth the headache and go another day. No, only families with four, five, six children—-or extended families who take bring all their aunts and uncles and cousins and grandma and grandpa—those are the families that say hey, we’re all about 1/2 price day. I know this because they were all in front of me in line.

At some point during our visit, the zoo reached capacity. Evidently, “capacity” is Latin for “good luck getting through here with a stroller, Loser.”  

But we really did have a fabulous day. The weather was perfect, and I had girded myself with major prayer on the way there. Chicken Little had a few anxiety moments when the other chickens failed to recognize the difference between situations requiring side-by-side-handholding and single-file-hand-on-the-shoulder-of-the-person-in-front-of-you. But in the end, she rose to the occasion, and I couldn’t have done it without her help. I reminded them all that today was about making family memories—-the good kind, not the kind that come from unplanned trips to the ER (are there planned trips to the ER?).  And we did a great job. We kept our cool, enjoyed each other’s company, and braved the crowds.

By 4oclock, we had seen everything we wanted to see. We’d even splurged an extra $8 to ride the train to save our tired feet from the 10 minute walk across the zoo. Of course, we had to stand in line on those tired feet for 45 minutes waiting to board the train. But Mason loves trains, and was completely blissfully happy for the entire 3 minute ride.

The 20 minute walk back to the car was infinitely more tortuous now that our feet hurt and our bodies were done with walking.  When you have four children, it is inevitable that you are going to hear the words, ”I can’t walk any further! I’m going to sit down RIGHT HERE. I MEAN it!  I (sniff) can’t (snuff) go on (sob).”

And for the record, Riley reminded me that since I’m the only one with a driver’s license, that really wasn’t an option….

Cold.
My fingers, my toes
And especially my nose.

Cold.
The floor, the toilet seat,
The water when I brush my teeth.

Cold.
The air that stings my chapped, dry skin
When I get out of the car—garage door opener’s on strike again.

Cold.
The Hubby’s mood when I wedge my frosty feet
Between his warm (and famous) knees.

Cold.
I can hardly wait till Summer’s here
So I can complain to all who can hear—

—about heat….

Yes, it is still cold. And I am still whining about the fact that it is cold. What’s more, we were supposed to get more snow this week—THEY promised us snow—and we didn’t. What good is cold without snow? Good for getting out of a nice warm bed and dragging the children to school in the cold, that’s what.

I have a lovely contingent of Great White Northward friends (both the contingent and the friends are lovely, in case you were looking for clarification) who say (with what I think is just a hint of sarcasm) “You should move to Canada.”

No, I’m fairly certain I shouldn’t. Maybe I could spend summers there, when it’s…oh, say…113degrees here in North Texas. Sure, then I’d take it.

I mean, I come from Canadian ancestry, tough Kanuck stock. You’d think I’d be genetically predisposed to dealing with the cold. Makes sense to me. The fact that my father drove a race car has always allowed me to believe I’m genetically predisposed to be an awesome driver. Which I totally am. In racing, the occasional wreck is all part of the sport.

But cold, no. Didn’t get those genes. I don’t know that any of my ancestors came from anywhere particularly known for temperate weather. English, Scotch (neat, thank you), German, Swiss, French, French-Canadian… Maybe my French ancestors came from the French Riviera—it’s warm there, right?

Of course, the irony is that I don’t like hot weather, either. When I was younger, I preferrred cold weather to hot—-because, I reasoned, you can always put on more clothes or blankets, but when it’s hot—well, you can only take so much off before it’s just you and your sweat. And then you’re still hot.

But the older I get, the more cold is not just uncomfortable, but downright painful (and evidently I’m getting older by the minute if the fact that I just used the word “downright” in a sentence is any indication). My nose actually hurts. My fingers and toes get so cold that every little stub and bump is magnified a hundredfold. The base of my spine actually hurts when I walk out the door and that first shock of cold air hits me. And my back is in spasms from the constant shivering.

I have tried the “put on more clothes and blankets.” I have slept in a shirt beneath a sweater beneath a heavy winter robe, with thick fleece pajama pants, socks (two pair), and houseshoes, under a blanket (which I wrap underneath my double-socked, houseshoed feet) and a sheet and a bedspread and another heavy blanket, only to realize that the blankets are just insulating my cold feet like a koozie wrapped around an icy Shiner Bock. Not that my feet are bock; they’d be more Shiner Blonde, but I prefer Bock, so I’m stickin’ with it. And no amount of bundling and blanketing has as of yet resolved the icy nose problem.

I happened to have a brainstorm one frosty night, realizing that the rice-sock heating pads (long tube socks. Fill with plain–not instant–white rice. Tie end. Microwave 3 min. You can thank me later.) could be molded around my face, providing much needed warmth in the central area where my nose is known to reside, without actually surrounding me in a carbon-dioxide cocoon of death. But then my kids came over and said, “Cool—you found our rice socks! Thanks, Mom! You’re the best!” So now the 14 year old has my shiny blue iPod AND my rice sock….

…which I am totally about to go swipe now that I’m sure she’s sound asleep….

Today has been hard….

I’ve decided that I’m just going to type this as it comes out, stream of consciousness style. You’re no doubt saying to yourself, “Gee, isn’t that how all your posts are, Ashley?”  But you have no idea how much editing and revising and crafting goes into one of my ordinary posts just to give it some vaporous semblance of readability.

I don’t have the wherewithall for that today. I’m just going to let it spill out, like warm Shiner on pavement, let it splash and foam and subside until it soaks in and is gone. (If you’re wondering what Shiner is, then you’re obviously not from Texas. Come visit; I’ll enlighten you).

Our social worker comes this weekend for our first homestudy visit. She will inspect my house, interview my family, and decide whether we are, in her opinion, fit and able to bring a couple of Eastern European orphans with Down syndrome into our home. Along with the homestudy is a scavenger-hunt list of items for us to gather up and present to the social worker: certified copies of birth certificates, our marriage license, sworn statements from our doctors that each member of our household might be expected to live to see an adopted child reach maturity (yeah, I thought that was a little morbid, too).

Assuming that we are found competent (snort. sorry…), there is the issue of finances. Our adoptions will cost about $26,000 each.   $52,000.  I get a little woozy every time I say that out loud. Actually, I got a little woozy typing it just now, for that matter. That’s a lot of money to raise.

We have a few fundraising events in the works. I am baking my almost-famous Key Lime Pies like crazy, selling them to sweet friends and family who are eager to be a part of our journey. But with life-and-death in the balance, we have to hustle to raise the money quickly.

Now, The Hubby and I have this automotive fantasy. It involves my first car, which is at this moment parked in my mother’s garage:  Sadie, a 1969 Cougar convertible. Red. 351. Sequential tail-lights. Rrrrrowww….  We’ve always planned to restore it one day. It will be our old-people car, the one that we’ll drive around town with the top down, letting our white hair blow in the breeze. He thinks I’ll let him drive. And I might. Once in a while.

A 1969 Cougar, from mustangandfords.com. Not MY Cougar, because all my pics are stowed away in boxes somewhere....

It’s a wonder I didn’t get myself killed driving that car around as a teenager. Man, she could haul like a scalded dog. I remember the adrenaline rush of pulling up to a stoplight next to some testosterone-infused JohnnyDangerous in a hot-rod of his own, revving the engine, inviting me to race. Nothing like being a 17 year-old girl, smokin’ some dude on Pioneer. Those were the days.

My father bought the car for my mother in 1975, with no consideration of the fact that it wasn’t practical for hauling two children, dry cleaning, and bags of groceries. He put it in her name, and when he left my junior year of high-school and mom needed me to have my own vehicle to get around town…well, Dad implored her not to let me drive it. It was too much car for a reckless teenager, he said. He said I’d end up totalling it, or worse. And mom said something like maybe-you-should-have-thought-of-that-before-you-left-me-on-my-own-to-raise-two-children-as-a-single-mother.

In the years after the divorce, that car became my connection to my father. Our relationship was often rocky. Not I-hate-you-you’re-ruining-my-life rocky, but the kind of rocky that happens when two people are too much alike to get along for extended periods of time. My mom used to say that when my father and I got into it, she could see laser beams extending from between our eyes. I have my father’s amber eyes, and she said that when the two of us were locked in battle, our matching glowers were too much for her, and she had to leave the room.

As I navigated the tricky sea of distance between the home he no longer shared with us and the home where I visited him a couple of times a month, it was the Cougar that gave me a sense of still belonging to him. I remember sitting in his garage as he replaced a CV joint, talking comfortably without the darkness of everything that had changed hanging over our heads.

I always thought I’d keep that car forever….

My father loved cars. Racing was his hobby: a Ford Fairlane when I was a baby (he told my mother it would make a great “family car.” The first thing he did when he got it home was rip out the back seat and install Hooker Headers); sleek, fiberglass-bodied European S-2000 class when I got older. He worked in auto fleet and leasing. A couple of years before he died, he personally went up against Lee Iacoca on a bid for the US Government…and won. 

As a celebration present, he bought himself a beautiful, blue-green Mazda RX-7, which I ran over in my driveway while he and The Hubby were at a NASCAR race. Backed my Nissan Pathfinder right up over the hood, coming to a stop inches from the windshield, taking both pop-up headlights out in the process. He passed away suddenly a month later. The last words I said to him in person before he died were, “I’m sorry I ran over your car, Dad.”

But even though he loved cars, he always said, “A car is just a metal box to get you where you need to go.”

Where I need to go right now is Russia.

A couple of years ago, my big-blue-Suburban refused to start in the parking lot of the Kinko’s where I’d just run copies of my manuscript (have I really been working on this novel for THAT long?).  A big, burly man in a pickup truck came along, gently berated a slightly-built good samaritan for his cheap “toy” jumper cables, and proceded to hook up his own behemoth, industrial cables under my hood. I commented that I felt a little out of sorts underneath this hood, that in my ’69 Cougar, I knew exactly where the best place to ground the negative was.

Turns out he had an old Cougar, too, that he’d restored himself. Furthermore, although we were in a neighboring city at the time, we lived in the same small town, just 5 minutes from eachother, and I had seen his Cougar out in front of his house.

Today, as I was driving around town to obtain two more of the items on my scavenger-hunt list, American Pie came on the radio. My dad and I used to sing along to that song, watching each others lips to see who would stumble on a line first. I was on my way to the bank, just a stone’s throw from the shop the Cougar guy owned. As I drove on, a Ford Fairlane pulled onto the road in front of me. It didn’t have the snazzy red-orange-and-yellow paintjob that Dad’s Thunderbolt sported after he quit pretending it was a family car and devoted it to weekend racing, but it was a Fairlane, a rare sight these days.

I started to cry.

God puts us where we need to be, and He puts people in our paths for a reason. And he hooked me up with a hot-rod mechanic who just happened to have rebuilt a Cougar and who just happened to live in my little small town. God has gone to great lengths so far in our adoption journey to put the cookies on the bottom shelf for me. 

All these years, I haven’t wanted to part with the Cougar because it was my father’s car. But now, I realize that it’s really my Father’s car. It’s only been on loan to me these 25 years. Time to give it back.

I cried while I was talking to The Cougar Guy. He said I can have AAA tow the car to his place sometime in the next couple of weeks, and he’ll give me an idea of how much we need to put into it to make it saleable. Funny thing is, I’m really okay with it. I’m excited about it. It’s bittersweet, but sweet nonetheless.

On the way home, I hit the CD button. Soolaimon. I remember my dad—-the impetus for my love of old Neil Diamond—- singing Soolaimon. Lord of my wants…God of my needs…Leading me on….  I will never listen to Soolaimon the same way again.

I’m glad it wasn’t queued to Crunchy Granola Suite….

If you want to know why it’s so urgent that we rescue these children, click HERE for a video clip of what life inside an Eastern European mental institution is like.

And if you want to know what’s going on in the lives of a couple of other crazy, hip bloggers like me, click HERE.