This is how I know I’m beginning to turn a corner.

Last night my husband and I went to a movie.  I seem to remember a long-ago practice called “Date Night” where you did things like go to a movie, but that’s so far back in history I don’t recall much else about it. 

Anyway, we went to a movie.  We saw The Hangover, which was laugh-out-loud funny for the entire length.  After the week I’ve had, I really needed that. 

Walking back to the car, it suddenly occurred to me that when I told my mom what movie we’d seen, she’d want to know if she and Dad would enjoy it.  That’s the point at which I would have to tell her that it had a good bit of, well, language in it.  You know, to sort of discourage them from going, because they would be offended. 

There were a lot of movies I didn’t see as a kid because my parents (read: my mother) wouldn’t let me.  I missed Porky’s the first time it came out.  For the life of me I still don’t know why my mother would never let me go see Grease.  Because I’ve seen it many times since I was a kid, and I don’t know what she found so wrong about it back then.  Probably her 1950’s sensibilities were offended, since after all, she was Class of ‘57 and the story depicted teens in the ’50’s.  And of course her generation was not like that at all.  Prim and proper, that was her bunch. 

Come to think of it, there were a lot of books I didn’t read either, because my mother deemed them too titillating for my young mind.  Not that (in retrospect) I missed a whole lot, since my mother favored bodice-rippers and my tastes ran decidedly more toward vampire novels.

At any rate, my generation seems to fling the F-word around quite a bit (including myself, I must admit) and if anything is going to offend my parents’ aging sensibilities, that would be it.  Ergo, The Hangover is not going to entertain them the way it did me. 

It’s come to this — me prescreening movies for my parents, like they did for me when I was a kid.  

 

– Mox

Like Elvis, only not.

 

 

– Mox

Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.

Okay.  So I’m on the committee that helps to put together a bluegrass music festival in my hometown every year.  I find it strange that I’m even on this committee, considering I’m not conversant in bluegrass, though I’m acquainted with the genre.  But it’s a position left over from the days when I worked with our local tourism office, that I was volunteered for the committee and elected to stay aboard after my stint with tourism ended. 

Recently I was approached to chair the subcommittee of which I am a member, since the subcommittee chair and her immediate boss were both declining to do the work this year. 

To which I said, oh hell no. 

That I am the logical choice to become the chair, I don’t dispute, considering the choice to be made from the other members of the subcommittee — five people — the two who are declining to do it, two “youngsters” (one who is pregnant and going on maternity leave, one who is sweet and shy), and me.  Me.  Me, who is arguably older and wiser and less likely to take any shit from someone. 

Two things are stopping me dead in my tracks.  One is that the two who are declining to do anything this year will be back in full force next year, so that would be awkward.  The other is I am afraid that if I were to take on the chair, it would become my job for life.

No good deed goes unpunished, folks. 

But in frantic and panicked emails flying back and forth between me and the two younger members of the committee, it became very clear to me that someone was going to have to step up and put an end to the bullshit.  As someone who is a bit removed from the situation (being that I do not work with the tourism office and therefore it does not affect my bottom line), I gave it some thought and told the other two that indeed, the show must go on.  Leave out the players in the drama that’s unfolding and focus, quietly and covertly, on getting the subcommittee’s job done. 

Which, of course, makes me the de facto chair. 

~sigh~

We’ll get it done. 

 

 

– Mox

Almost there.

It’s almost criminal how long it takes for tomatoes to come into season around here. 

My tomatoes look a little spindly this year.  No idea why, though I suspect it’s the soil being depleted.  Guess that means this fall it will be amend, amend, amend until the soil is back to being robust.  The cucumbers and squash, however, are taking over the place. 

Nothing better than a garden tomato, fresh from the vine and still warm from the sun, in my opinion. 

 

– Mox

Seeking a ten foot pole.

When I was a kid, my grandmother hung her clothes on a pair of clotheslines that stretched from her back porch to a post mounted at the alley.  When I reach back into my mental files, I imagine it to be a lot longer and a lot higher than it probably actually was. 

Like all top-notch grandmothers, my grandmother would give me blankets and quilts and let me make a tent from her clothes line, where I could lie in the shade with snacks and my books and enjoy a breeze.  Two long bamboo poles with v’s cut into one end helped to keep the line from dipping too low to the ground.  On laundry days, my grandmother would hang her clothes on the lines, and the wet clothes would sag the line to a level that her small frame could easily reach, and then she would position the poles to keep the clothes out of the way of small children with dirty hands. 

As I look back on it now, I realize it was a great system. 

She eventually got an electric clothes dryer, and I eventually got too sophisticated for blanket tents. 

I was reminded of this today when I used my clothesline for the first time to dry some sheets.  I bought a retractable line and badgered my husband into mounting it from the eave of his outbuilding (because badgering is the technique that works best) and putting the catch hook into a post on our deck.  It’s been a number of years since I hung anything out to dry, and I had to reacquaint myself with the physics involved. 

Now, wet sheets don’t really weigh too much, but when I hung my sheets on the line, the line started to sag.  I fought with it for a while and got the tension on the line just right.  But it occurred to me that what I really need is a long bamboo pole or two. 

The sheets came off the line crisp and smelling of sunshine. 

 

– Mox

Weird science.

I have pretensions of being an organic gardener, and for the most part I do a pretty good job keeping my garden beds free from artificial means of control.  I’m pretty pleased to say that at least in my vegetable beds, I’ve not used a single chemical control.  I handpick pests, encourage beneficial bugs, amend the soil with compost, rotate crops, water with collected rainwater, and hand-weed.  All that is a little more labor-intesive than using chemical weed-killer or bug-killer or fertilizer, and since I’ve only got four raised beds, it’s doable for me. 

I was examining my garden the other night when I ran across this bugaboo: 

(Note: not my photo)

I plucked it off and dropped in in a mason jar, along with the denuded stalk of tomato plant it had been systematically consuming, and set it on my desk to Spawn and the cats to admire.  My specimen had to be at least 4 inches long, so it begs the question — how did I not notice it before it grew to that mammoth size? 

This, in the vernacular of my youth, is a ‘baccer worm.  If you’ve spent any time at all in a tobacco patch, you recognize it immediately.  This jolly green giant pupates into a little brown papery husk of a cocoon,

hornworm pupa

and then into a Sphinx moth. 

adult

Sphinx moths are important pollinators, particularly in the evening hours, so no matter how ooked out I felt (and how irritated I was to have a partially eaten tomato plant) I wasn’t going to kill it. 

In fact, in doing a little bit of research on the ol’ Internet, I discovered exactly what the pupa looks like, and remembered I had discovered a wealth of spent husks when I turned my beds for the first time this spring.  Apparently, my organic-ish garden is a good nursery for ‘baccer worms.  Good to know, since that means I’ll need to keep a closer watch on my tomatoes and peppers. 

Additional information at The Door Garden. 

However, the Japanese beetles are making mincemeat out of my roses and mallow plants, and while I will patiently handpick and drop them into a bucket of soapy water (a fine exercise to calm a jumpy mind, by the way), chances are just as good that I’ll load them up with Sevin.  For every one I kill there’s one less laying eggs, the way I figure it. 

– Mox

The difference between six and eight.

Yesterday the Mox family took a much-ballyhooed trip to a local amusement/water park, ahead of the crushing holiday weekend crowd. 

The last time we took Spawn to this park the kid was only six.  I was a pretty nervous nanny at that point, because at six Spawn was a slight little sliver of a thing, and those water rides and roller coasters seemed to me to be giant gaping maws of mangulation.  But Spawn at six was game for just about anything, and a good time was had by all, despite my having declared a personal moratorium on roller coasters.  Label me a sissy if you must, but age and reason have conspired to keep my easily misaligned spine from any sort of herky-jerky rides. 

The thing I loved about Spawn at six was the kid’s willingness to try anything.  And believe me, we put it to the test that day, taking the kid onto rides at the water park that began hundreds of feet in the air and swirled through darkened tunnels before splashing into the drink.  Spawn also began a personal quest that day, to ride all the roller coasters in the park.  On the first one the kid ever rode, which arguably was the biggest in the park (go big or go home, apparently), Spawn insisted on waiting until the front car was available, because “that’s the best seat.”  O…kay.  And then proceeded to ride it like a pro, hands in the air.  And yea verily, it was declared “awesome!”

We didn’t make it to the park last summer because schedules and budgets conspired against us, so my husband and I made it a point to put it on our schedule this summer.  After all, Spawn had to mark that last roller coaster off the list. 

While Spawn’s excitement was palpable yesterday, once we got into the water park and hit that first couple of rides, I felt a bit of change in the kid.  It seemed as if the kid was hesitant.  Gone was the bravado.  We spent the first half of the day on the water and the latter half in the amusement park, so that Spawn could ride the roller coaster.  Once that was out of the way, the kid was pretty much ready to hit the trail for home.  Ordinarily we’d the the ones dragging our child out of a place like the amusement park; yesterday our day ended without so much as a small protest. 

I’ve watched Spawn grow more cautious with age, believing that such a thing would be good, and to some extent relieve me of having to put myself between my child and danger.  But with an abundance of caution has come a loss of spunk, and having become accustomed to dealing with the spunk, I find myself a bit lost. 

We left the park tired, hungry, and sunburned, and with a feeling like we hadn’t wrung the fun out of every possible moment of our day.  That something felt, to me, like disappointment. 

 

– Mox

This is the place where I admit I don’t give two figs about Michael Jackson.

Really.  I mean, I have some sympathy in my heart for his family, and I feel badly for those in his employ, but that’s about it. 

I was a child of the 80’s.  I remember MJ back then.  I was not a fan, short of a brief admiration of the Thriller video.  And I am still not a fan, even today. 

My contemporaries on Facebook have been posting video after video after video, and it’s been all I can do to endure it.  There for a while over the weekend, even the venerable CNN website listed coverage of MJ over coverage of what’s happening in Iran. 

Seriously? 

I mean, really.  Let’s not put this on the same playing field as Elvis.  Because I can see the future — people will say that MJ did not die, he just faked his death.  These same people do not want to believe it’s true, will not accept it. 

When an old person dies, he takes a large portion of the past with him.  When a child dies, he takes a large portion of the future.  What about a man somewhere in the middle?  What does he take with him? 

I am waiting for some semblance of normalcy to return to the world. 

 

– Mox

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

If you’ve been reading here any length of time, you know that the Mox family enjoys the beach.  We like the beach for many reasons.  If you’re us and you’re at the beach, it’s warm.  We like warm.  We also like sunny and breezy.  We like the opportunities we get to see some nature.  We like to build sand sculptures, too. 

It was with this in mind that my husband and I set about building a sandbox for Spawn in our back yard.  Previous sandboxes were more like sand piles, just a bit of river sand dumped strategically at the foot of the playset climbing tower.  Spawn pretty well dug to China in that stuff, mixing it with the dirt underneath to the point that it was no longer a sandpile but a mudhole. 

As a mom and the person who does the laundry around here, I am not in favor of mudholes. 

When spring rolled around, we looked at the sad, sorry state of the sandpile and decided to really do it up right this year.  My husband trenched out about six inches of dirt, lined it with landscape fabric, and rimmed it with edging.  All it needed was sand. 

We searched for a while for play sand, but the play sand we found was pretty much river sand, just bagged up and pricey.  And then we found it:  white sand. 

White sand like you find on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. 

Though it was considerably pricier than the regular play sand, we bought enough of it to fill the sandbox, and voila — Spawn had a personal beach. 

It’s been a great hit.  Except I forgot one thing about white sand.  White sand is so finely grained that it sticks to any and everything, and you can’t just dust it off like regular river sand.  Which means you track it in on your feet and it clings to your clothes, and it’s hard to get swept up. 

The floors in my house are now slightly gritty, as are the sheets on Spawn’s bed.  I find white footprints on my green carpet, and could probably exfoliate with the sand that finds its’ way onto my legs each night. 

A little bit of the beach brought home. 

 

– Mox

Sound advice.

 

 

– Mox