Forecast Freak Out

Next Saturday is my daughter’s high school graduation. We are having family come up from Florida, down from New York, and in from Pennsylvania. My house is very, very small, so we are relying on our yard/garage/deck to make the after party festive and roomy. The only thing that can ruin it is rain.

The ladies in the front office at the high school said they have never, ever been rained out. It may have drizzled for a portion of the graduation, but in all the years that they can recall, Fluvanna County High School has never had to move the ceremonies indoors.

Rain would suck. I would only be allowed to have 7 people attend the graduation ceremony in the event of rain, and I’ve got 14 coming. After that I’d have to host a party for 16+ in a 12 x 20 room. Sound like fun?

And here is the forecast…

Thanks, Mother Nature. You suck.

But you know what? It’s still a week away – jet streams could shift, right? RIGHT? I mean, it may not actually rain during the the ceremony or party. It may rain the day before, or at 8 pm that night. Right? RIGHT? I am just going to focus on that 40%. It’s less than half – the odds are still in my favor.

I went through this when I held a Halloween party for my youngest last October. It was an outdoor party, and if it rained I was screwed. Early forecasts called for rain, but it held off until later that night. Question is, can I dodge another bullet?

On the upside? Most of the company coming is my family, and they will excuse/help/pitch in for anything and everything. It will be alright even if it does rain.

But I don’t want it to. I really don’t want to see any rain.

“Don’t tell me not to live, just sit and putter
Life’s candy and the sun’s a ball of butter
Don’t bring around a cloud to rain on my parade!”

Keep your fingers crossed.

“Digging” My Mother’s Day

Each and every Mother’s Day I do the same thing, weather permitting. I buy plants, herbs, veggies, bags of potting soil and I get my garden ready for the upcoming growing season. It’s quite possibly my favorite day of the whole year.

When we moved into this house in 2001 my little side garden was pretty bare. There was a bush here and there, and a few hostas, but it was basically a blank canvas. Now, after 12 years of tinkering in the soil, it’s looking fairly grown in and I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished.

It was a journey figuring out what would grow where and what wouldn’t. I’ve lost my fair share of plants, which annoys me to no end. I’ve also learned that there are bare spots where nothing will grown because there are too many roots underneath.  That is where I place pots filled with impatiens or some other colorful plant.

Last year I decided to grow a maple tree. I love the color of their fall foliage, but I was too cheap to go out and buy a tree. Instead I found seed pods on a tree in town and planted it in a pot. My sapling is on it’s 2nd year and has encouraged me to try growing another. This year I got seeds from a Japanese Maple – I hope they sprout.

We also added a pond in a spot that was pretty much good for nothing – the soil was always dense and wet, and it got no sun. Now it’s the centerpiece of my garden. We get tadpoles every year hoping they will grow into frogs, and we have two Koi that spent the winter in my daughter’s science class. Time to get those bad boys back in the pond.

My deck has also become a garden of sorts. I grow tomatoes and cucumbers in containers, and have an herb garden as well. Last year’s lemon thyme, rosemary and parsley were wonderful accompaniments to many a summer dinner.

My veggies? They never do too well. I think I yielded 4 tomatoes from my plant last year, and the only cukes I grew resembled spiky golf balls. They were really tasty though. Even though I’ve proven to not have a green thumb for veggies, I don’t give up. I’ll keep trying different varieties until I find one that works for me.

Of course the cicadas are ruining it a bit for me this year. Everywhere I turn I’m finding shells or newly-hatched cicadas, and I don’t like bugs, so it’s sort of like gardening in a mine field. One flew in my daughter’s hair yesterday and she screamed, threw my trowel 6 feet in the air and ran in a circle until I could deem her bug-free. Then she went in the house for the remainder of the day.

Another blight on this year’s garden-o-rama was a slight “doh!” moment on the part of my hubby. One day while he was out doing some pond/yard work he got it into his head to put out all my garden decorations. He even broke some to use in ways he felt would look nice. This is such a major faux pas, you don’t even know. Half of the fun of my Mother’s Day planting spree is to find the perfect spot for each little bird house and garden spike. I was mad. I don’t think he’ll do it again next year.

Whatever your Mother’s Day ritual is, I hope you are having as good a day as I am – the weather is beautiful and the sun is shining bright in a clear, blue sky. Hell, what am I doing typing this? Time to get back outside and do my thang.

$86 Gone in the Blinker of an Eye

Have you ever been to traffic court?

I had to go years ago when I was living in Florida. I had been a resident of the Sunshine State for almost a year but never got a Florida driver’s license. I just couldn’t part with my Jersey one I guess. I also couldn’t part with my Jersey plates, and before long I got pulled over for having expired tags.

Turned out that having an out of state license while living in Florida was an offense that held a penalty larger than just paying a fine. I had to go to court, and I was petrified. As long as I could prove that I’d procured a Florida license and plates, I would only have to pay a small fine, but still, I was scared.

As I sat in court, my nerves began to dissipate as I watched other cases go by. Many of them were for passing bad checks – all at Publix. One man was accused of bashing in his ex-girlfriend’s front door. And another man was convicted of exposing himself to children in a park. This was some heavy stuff…and here I was with my out of state driver’s license offense. By the time it was my turn I was almost proud of what an upstanding citizen I was.

That was around 15 years ago. Day before last I found myself in traffic court again, but this time, it was hubby who was on the docket.

He was driving home from working an overnight shift, and I’m always thankful when I hear him come in the house, safe and sound. He often talks of coming close to nodding off on the long and boring ride home. It’s why I understand the mistake he made.

He was less than a block from our development, where he has to make a right hand turn. It was 5:30 am, there was nobody else on the road with him. But off the road was a State Trooper parked in the weeds. Hubby saw him, checked his speed to make sure he was not going to fast, made his right hand turn, and was shocked to see the lights in the rear view mirror.

He got a ticket for not using his blinker. Can you believe that? Now, I’m a rule follower by nature, but come on. I can see if he’d been speeding – then you can pile on the fines. But is business that slow that you have to break someone’s balls for failing to flip a switch? Don’t get me started on how I feel about cops in general. It’s not a pretty topic.

When he came home that morning he was crushed. The fines totaled over $100 – that’s money we don’t have to spare these days. I suggested we go to court. Maybe he could talk his way out of it, or the cop wouldn’t be there that day. Oh, turns out that is rarely true – we discovered that the officer is held in contempt of court if he fails to appear on the scheduled court date. So much for that urban legend.

Hubby’s court date was Tuesday morning, and we got there with 20 or so minutes to spare. An officer made him leave the courtroom to tuck his shirt in. We also got scolded for whispering to each other. One couple was not allowed to enter at all because the defendant showed up in a dirty T-shirt and jeans. Even Judge Judy yells at you for that shit. Duh.

Once again, it was interesting to see the other cases go by, and once again, hubby felt like a fine, upstanding citizen next to some of the offenses other people were brought up for. There was one DUI – he had to do jail time. One gal was speeding and wasn’t wearing her seat belt. And one woman was brought in wearing an orange jumpsuit and was shackled at wrist and foot. I couldn’t quite hear what she’d done wrong, but I suspect it was for more than a minor traffic infraction.

By the time hubby stood up before the judge for not using his blinker, he was too nervous to do any smooth talking and simply plead guilty. The judge was feeling generous, and knocked off $25 because hubby’s driving record was good. I was relieved that he’d given us a break, and it proved that appearing in court rather than blindly paying the ticket was beneficial.

I’ll tell you, knowing that there are cops out there ready, willing, and able to ruin your day, I’ve been paying attention to my driving. It’s easy to get lazy – how often do you slow roll through a stop or forget to flip on your blinker? I know I was super lazy, but this ticket of hubby’s opened my eyes. Money is too tight to throw it to the county – I’m going to make sure I give them nothing to pull me over for.

The Grass is Rarely Greener

When my husband and I bought our little house 12 years ago, there was no lawn. There were weeds, and saplings, and bramble, but no lawn. The property had been left to the ways of the wild; every acorn given free reign to grow into a mighty oak, every pine nut encouraged to sprout up a tiny little pine tree.

While viewing the house with our Realtor I picked my way around the lot, tripping here and there on a root or a rock. I imagined a rich, sun-dappled lawn; green and lush and freshly mowed. My brother-in-law suggested we mulch the whole front, and I gaped at him in horror. Mulch? No sir!

Before the ink was dry on our mortgage papers we called in a landscaper. Hubby and I spent a weekend digging out and pulling up every tree, root, rock and weed. Then the men came and tilled the soil, added in pounds of lime and other things good for the soil, spread seed, and laid down the straw. Within a few weeks the front of our house was carpeted in green. A neighbor even stopped one day while walking past and told me how much nicer the house looked.

The lawn held it’s own – for a few years. There were spots where the grass never seemed to take hold, and I’d scrape up the earth and re-seed it each fall and spring, but eventually it would revert back to dirt, or clover, or moss.

We rented an aerator once and plugged the entire lawn, then put down more seed. Our lawn looked great until we hit a drought. It rained something like 4 times the entire summer. Everyone’s lawn looked like crap that year.

Then we decided to hire professionals – TruGreen to be exact. Their team came in and did a whole bunch of treatments and sprays and seedings and feedings, and our lawn looked great. Until we went on vacation for 2 weeks. We halted the service and by the time we got back our lawn had deteriorated greatly. Our neighbor told us we’d had plenty of rain, so it couldn’t have been that. It made me distrustful of the company – how could a lawn could fall to pieces in the span of 13 days?

So we fired them. Here we are 3 years later and our lawn is in the worst shape it’s ever been.

I stare at neighbor’s lawns with envy. My husband says it’s because we have too many trees on the property, but I’ve seen homes with lush, green lawns that have just as many trees as we have. I want to give up, but I just can’t.

I went out yesterday and bought a bag of plain Jane grass seed – nothing fancy. No self watering, mulch covered seed – that’s too expensive. I scraped and dug and scratched away 3 wheelbarrows full of moss, and seeded 1/8 of my lawn. I was too tired to do any more then, but I will today. I’ll work hard to fill in the gaps and maybe, just maybe, I’ll have a halfway decent lawn by July.

Then Hubby and I will fight over who gets to use the lawnmower.

 

The Lame Lunch That Left my Wallet Light

Nothing irks me more than when I think I have wasted money. I believe it occurs most while dining out – paying for food that wasn’t all that great is the ultimate waste of one’s hard-earned dollar.

Sometimes it’s unavoidable – like when you’re at an amusement park. You pay $5 for a slice of pizza that tastes like cheese and sauce on Wonder Bread, and another $4 for a soda that is 85% ice cubes. But unless you are willing to get hand-stamped, exit the park and picnic out of your car, you have little choice. (By the way, we did that all the time as teens going to Great Adventure in New Jersey)

However, when I am free to chose amongst the hundreds of eating establishments in town, and I chose a clunker, I get mad. That happened to me yesterday. Our family decided to have lunch together before hubby headed to work and my girls and I finished our prom shopping.

See, it was senior cut day, so my oldest was “off” from school. As luck would  have it, it was also the day that my youngest daughter’s school was having a BMX bike show for kids who sold enough items in their fundraiser. I blogged about my issues with this fundraiser a few months back (read it here), and vowed to boycott the school that day. So, the four of us were looking for a place to eat lunch.

There’s a restaurant called The Riverside that makes really good burgers. However, they are always crowded, and the parking lot is a hassle to maneuver around, especially when they are crowded, which they always are. There is another joint across the street called Jak n’ Jil. They’ve been in business since 1954, and are supposed to be known for their foot-long hot dogs, so we decided to give them a try.

The prices for your average burger or dog seemed reasonable enough. Some of the other sandwiches and platters seemed a bit pricey for me; a Gyro was almost $8 and I was fairly certain there was no little Greek man in the back shaving lamb off a spit. Eight bucks wasn’t worth spending if all you got was pre-packaged gyro meat.

We all got burgers or dogs, an order of fries, an order of onion rings, one milkshake, and one soda. I had water.

My dog was just ok. It tasted like a very low quality dog…you know, the kind that tastes like baloney? My bun was dry and too big for the dog – with each bite I felt like all I was eating was white bread, and then my mouth would find some of the hot dog, and my brain would say “oh, there’s some baloney.”

The onion rings, priced at $3.75 were also a disappointment. They only gave us 7 onion rings. That’s over fifty cents per ring.

When it came time to pay the bill, I was astounded when the gal behind the counter said “That will be $32.60.”

How’s that?

Within seconds my brain counted through all the things I could have bought for $32. Things that I have avoided buying because I am trying to watch every dime. Things like:

• A haircut
• Plants for my garden
• Grass seed for my lawn
• A new pot to replace the one with the bowed bottom that wobbles on my stove when I’m trying to boil water

Instead, I had spent it on HOT DOGS.

I was furious. I turned to my husband and said “Thirty-two dollars for that…can you believe it?” I didn’t care who heard. I was in no mood to be polite. I went back to check the menu and did a little quick mental math. Although all the prices seemed reasonable, once you added it all up it equaled out to a pretty pricey repast.

I usually try to keep our lunches under $20, sometimes even less if I have a coupon. Hell, I was pissed a few weeks ago when I paid over $18 for a three slices of pizza and a salad at Sabarro. And here I spent twice that amount on a lunch that was nothing more than baloney sticks.

Ugh. Thirty-two dollars on hot dogs and fries. Had they been good dogs? You wouldn’t be reading this. There’s a place where I grew up called Hiram’s that makes the best hot dogs I’ve ever had. Anthony Bourdain featured them on an episode of “No Reservations.”  Those dogs are worth paying $32 for.

So what’s a gal to do? Nothing. All I can do is put Jak n’ Jil’s on my permanent “no way, José” list. They will never, ever see another thin dime of my money.

And to add insult to injury, every time I burped I was given a gentle reminder of the money I had wasted.

 

The College Financial Freefall

I’ve never had any desire to jump out of an airplane. There are some folks – thrill seekers – that thrive on crap like that. Me? No way. There is too much time during that free fall to the earth below to think of all the things that could go wrong; like the chute not opening.

But sometimes you have to jump. It’s not a matter of adding a bit of excitement to your life. Sometimes you have to jump because life requires it.

For the past 6 months our family has been struggling over what path my college-bound daughter was going to take. It’s been a rough decision. She’s not sure what she wants to do, and we have little to no money. Even a high school drop out would be able to surmise that they don’t add up to a successful plan for one’s future.

Last week we made up our minds. We crapped and got off the pot. My daughter will be a member of the 2013 freshman class at VCU.

I am super excited about our decision. Excited that we made a decision. While I am a bit apprehensive about my green, inexperienced, shy little girl attending college in a rather large city, I am glad that she is getting out on her own. I am glad that rather than continuing to live with us and attending the local community college, that she is jumping in with both feet and is going to get the full throttle living on your own (but coming home on the weekends) college experience.

Making this decision was a leap of faith much like jumping out of an airplane. Our family is now in a collegiate financial free fall. We know we have the money for the fall semester.  That is our parachute. The 2nd semester? That may require a loan or two, but I’m confident we can swing it.

Sophomore year? We haven’t a clue. That is the pull cord. Will the chute open and drift my child safely into her 2nd year? Nobody knows. But I decided I wasn’t going to let the “what ifs?” get in the way of my daughter’s “right now.” Let’s see what she does with her freshman year. Meanwhile, we can continue to find ways to fund her sophomore year. Hell, by next September I could be a millionaire and won’t need to worry about any of this.

For now I will concentrate on her high school graduation, and then helping her find a summer job. August will be here soon enough – when I will not only have to fork over tons of cash, but my precious baby girl in the search for higher education.

And You May Find Yourself Behind the Wheel of a Large Automobile

For the past few weeks, I’ve been teaching my oldest daughter to drive.

She’s a bit behind the rest of her friends when it comes to getting behind the wheel. Most of her friends can drive already. I pass them on the way back from dropping her off at school. But due to a combination of fear, procrastination, and sheer laziness my gal didn’t get her permit until just a few months ago. Then it was my turn to be lazy and procrastinate.

After she got her permit it just never crossed my mind to put her behind the wheel and actually teach her what to do. I had my mind on other things. When she would suggest a lesson, I was either in a rush to get home to make dinner, or it was bad weather…there was a million excuses. It just always seemed like such an inconvenience.

I finally gave her her first shot at driving on the way home from town one afternoon. I pulled over into an empty school parking lot to let her circle around a few times. It was amazing  how many little things I had to show her. I’ve been driving for so long that many of the intricacies of driving are second nature to me. After a 5 minute lecture about what is where – blinkers, mirror adjusters, emergency brake – she put the car into drive and made a slow crawl around the parking lot.

Yet, after that we didn’t really do much driving. We would find a spot to let her practice here and there, but we weren’t doing it on a regular basis. Again, her learning to drive was off my radar – it wasn’t something I was actively concerned with. But I realized I had to make it a concern of mine. If we only went out every now and then she wasn’t ever going to get any better. Like an athlete in training, she needed lots of practice.

So, I’ve been making it a point to take her out every day. Usually we just drive around our neighborhood. Our development has a main road that makes a 10 mile loop. The speed limit is 25 which is perfect for someone just learning to drive. And you know what?  She’s getting pretty good at it.

The daily flexing of her driving muscles is paying off.  She’s maintaining the speed limit most of the time, and it’s been a few days since I had to grab the wheel to keep her from side swiping a mail box. She’s driven me to the supermarket a few times, which gives her parking practice as well, and she was brave enough to take the quicker route home along the major road the other day. That one has a 50 mph speed limit…she made it to 45, but that was about it.

I don’t have a whole lot of memories about learning to drive. I do recall one instance where when out driving with my dad, we went down the main street in Ridgefield Park, NJ. This road was narrow….really narrow with barely enough room for two cars to pass each other. There was street side parking as well, so driving down that stretch of road you almost felt like you were threading a needle. At least it seemed that way to a 16 year old behind the wheel of a Pontiac Catalina. I avoided that road until well after I got my license.

Oh, and getting my license? It took me two tries. I passed the written test easy, but I the driving portion was a bit trickier. The instructor I got for my first attempt was in a very bad mood, which made me nervous from the start. Here I am, happy as a clam to be taking my driving test, and this dude is filled to the brim with attitude. You took the test along a series of fake roads they had at the DMV. The roads were not very wide, and they had no dividing line painted down the middle.

I failed the parallel parking portion of the test, but that was to be expected. The cones were not set at a favorable distance for parking a Catalina – it was one big car. But when we returned to the designated starting/stopping point, he turned to me and said, “You failed.” He claimed I drove down the middle of the road the entire test. “Well,” I said, “the middle is all there is on those roads unless you wanted me to drive on the grass.” Sass was not an asset on this occasion.

The instructor I got my second time around was way cooler. I still failed the parallel parking part, but that day I left the Lodi DMV with a New Jersey driver’s license.

I’m hoping that by the time my girl starts college in the fall she’ll have her license. Our state sucks in that they require that you pay mega $$$$ to a driver’s school before they will issue you a license. I think it’s highway robbery – it costs almost $400 to take the driving course that isn’t going to teach her anything that I can’t. But sadly, there is no way around it. At least she’s learning like I did – in a very large car. The Sloviemobile is a Mercury Sable Wagon, a giant much like the Pontiac I learned in.

I’ll tell you, it will be nice to have another driver in the house. I’m not always in the mood to run to the store or drive my youngest to a friend’s house. That’s when I will gladly hand over the keys.

But then I’ll worry. I guess you can’t win.

The Joys of Being a Stay at Home Mom

It’s mid April, and I’m still an unemployed graphic designer. Money is tight, but not unbearable yet. My kids are finishing up their school year; they only have about 4 weeks left. I’ve been home for over 4 months now, and you know what?

I absolutely love it.

I have always been envious of stay at home mothers. Days filled with household chores, picking up children, maybe a hobby or two…it’s a vacation compared to having to head into an office day after day. My job was creative, at least I had that – I can only imagine what it’s like to just type or file all day. The day would drag on and on. the 8 hour day felt like 12…or 13.

Now, I get to be a house mom for the first time in my life outside of maternity leave. The day goes by very quickly. I’m surprised at just how swiftly 3 and 4 o’clock rolls around. I drive my girls to school each day, and before the bus drops them off (if I don’t pick them up, that is) I have cleaned, shopped, gardened, and exercised. I barely watch TV anymore. I learned my lesson with my “Weeds” obsession.

I love being home for my kids. If they forget something, I can bring it to them. If there’s a class trip, I can go without having to jump through a bunch of scheduling hoops to take a day off. I didn’t have to worry at all when schools were closed for snow, or President’s Day. And when they get off the bus, I’m there to make them a snack, and take my oldest out for a driving lesson, and any and all things that I could never do before because I was stuck at work until 5.

Now that I’ve turned the TV off, I try to fill my day doing stuff that will improve my little home. I put in a woodland path behind our garage using pine logs that were stacked, unused as we don’t have a fireplace or fire pit. It also gave us a small flower bed which I quickly planted with some berry bushes and even tried some veggies that thrive in clay soil…broccoli and cabbage.

Old logs and Elbow Grease

I’ve been scratching at the barren spots in our front yard and planting grass seed. I’ve been raking the masses of oak leaves that find a home each and every fall on the strip of land next to our driveway. Eventually, I’m going to attack our front deck which badly needs to be scrubbed, sanded and painted.

That is, unless I go back to work. Then my hours will be filled with who knows what kind of tasks. It’s becoming glaringly evident to me that unless I go back to school and get some web design skills I can kiss my career good-bye. Most job postings I see require some web experience, and I have almost none.

I can try to do some freelance, but it may take me a while to build a steady client base. For example, I was able to gain two new clients for a least a little work, but they are so busy right now that we haven’t had time to actually start the projects they want me to do. I know I need to get my name out there, and I have an idea for a postcard, I just have to sit my ass down and make it.

My other option is to just work doing anything – anything that will bring home some dough. Something mindless. I can be creative any time I want, I don’t necessarily need to earn a living at it. Except I won’t really be earning a living. I’ll be earning enough to keep our bills paid. After that there will be little left for extras like movies or shopping. Summer is right around the corner. The girls are going to want to do stuff.

Meh, I don’t want to go back to the 9-5 world! I love my days being my own!

Now I have to finish my laundry and clean my house. Then, I’ll watch the episode of “Project Runway” on my DVR. By then it should be time to pick up the kids at school – I give them a break from the school bus on Fridays – it’s a perk of mom being home.

Sounds like a perfect day to me.

Your Kiss is on My Sh%t List

During the summer between 7th and 8th grade, I experienced a rite of passage that almost every living, breathing human being undergoes…their first kiss. And as is so typical of Tracy, it was not your average kiss. No, mine did not happen at the end of a first date, or in the dim lights of the school gym during the Miss LHS dance. No, mine was not so sweet as that.

I spent a lot of weekends with my Aunt Carol growing up. My Aunt is a blog post or two in itself – I loved her dearly and her apartment was home sweet home for me at least one weekend out of every month. She lived in a complex that took up an entire block…a rather large block. There must have been 40 to 50 apartment buildings housed on that one block. There was a group of younger boys I played with that lived in the building right next to Aunt Carols, so I usually stayed right in her little courtyard.

However, kids will be kids and at times we got bored. That’s when we would stray. We never left the block, but we would wander along the pathways that led to other courtyards, and other kids. I didn’t know any of them because I lived in another town, but my friends knew them, and they usually didn’t get along with them. There would be taunting and chasing, and we’d eventually wind up back where we belonged – usually after some wise words from me. I’m not a big fan of confrontations.

One day during that summer between 7th and 8th grade, there was a boy I’d never seen before. We’d been walking through the complex and he was out hitting wiffle balls, sporting a NY Mets cap. My friends, being Yankees fans, began breaking his chops about the Mets. This is a totally normal NY/NJ occurrence…Mets fans get picked on. It’s almost like a food chain thing.

His name was Tony, and I was a tad smitten. I was around 14 at the time, and he must have been 16. He was cute…dark hair, cut off jean shorts and a halfway decent physique. When we began teasing him, he started to chase us around. I liked it. I especially liked getting caught.

It was getting late and moms began to call their kids home for dinner. I told my friends to tell my Aunt I’d be right there. I was having fun playing “tag” with this very cute guy who was more my age than the boys I usually played with when I stayed with Aunt Carol. It was warm and the sun was going down, and I was having too good of a time to go home.

We kept chasing each other for a few more minutes and I remember I plopped on the ground to catch my breath. He grabbed me and said “Gotcha!” I was saying stuff like “The Mets still suck!” and he was tickling me. The next thing I knew, he had pinned me down with the plastic wiffle ball bat. He hung over me for a second or two and that’s when he did it.

I knew he was going to kiss me, I just didn’t realize it was going to be a KISS kiss. Rather than a soft, innocent kiss, he mashed his lips against mine and before I knew it his tongue was in my mouth.

His breath was really bad. I thought, “Is this what kissing is like?” I was not enjoying this.

In fact, I found it utterly repulsive.

I got up and ran home. A few minutes later there was a knock at my Aunt’s door. There was Tony through the peephole! I begged my Aunt to tell him I was in the shower…anything to avoid talking to him. I was both embarrassed and disgusted – I’d reacted like a child, but I couldn’t help myself. It was so gross!

The next day I saw him again, and he apologized. I told him I just wasn’t used to kissing that way and that he’d caught me off guard. It was so uncomfortable talking to him. I was sure he thought I was a total baby for running away. After that when I went to visit Aunt Carol I steered clear of his section of the complex.

Now it’s just another story I tell my girls during boring drives home from town. My introduction to boys and romance was balls to the wall. There was no dipping my toe in the pool to see how it felt – I got pushed in the deep end instead.

Beyond the Pale Green Egg

Yesterday my girls and I took a trip to town to do a little shopping. After lunch, we decided to go to Target to see if there were any new Skylanders. I lucked into the first parking spot in the aisle, and proceeded to get out of my car. The driver’s side door was right next to a little island, freshly mulched with a few low, bushy evergreen shrubs. Sitting there in the mulch was an egg.

It was pale green – the color of an Easter Egg dying experiment gone wrong. I’ve seen it a million times with my girls. They dunk the egg in yellow, then decide on blue, then switch to pink; the result is a sickly greenish grey egg. This was the same color, and the same size and shape of a jumbo chicken egg.

I called to my girls, alerting them about the egg, and they both ran over and gawked at it in amazement. My guess was an old Easter Egg. I mean, Easter had only passed a few weeks back, and it was more conceivable to me that this was an abandoned hard-boiled egg than a bird egg because:

a) There were no trees with nests anywhere around us.
b) Why in the world would an egg be on a mulched parking median in front of Target?

My youngest grabbed a couple of napkins from my glove box and picked the egg up. We all looked at it with a mixture of wonder and puzzlement. Our curiosity getting the best of us, we wanted to crack it, but I did not want to do it by my car. If it was a rotten egg, I didn’t want it smelling up my parking spot. So we took it to a secluded area and passed it from person to person. Nobody wanted to be the one to crack it, so the task was left to Mommy.

Remember, I’m still fully expecting this thing to be a hard-boiled egg.

I gently tossed the egg on the curb of another row of shrubs, and the top cracked. Out oozed clear goo. And a little blood. And some orangey looking stuff.

This was no hard-boiled egg. My youngest began to wail “We killed it! We killed it!” Now, I know full well that no egg left alone in middle of a Target parking lot was a viable bird-to-be, but I still felt kind of shitty. We walked into the store and did our shopping the whole while trying to explain to my youngest that whatever was in the egg was already dead. I told her how animals know when an offspring is defective and how they usually kill it.

But I still felt really crappy. Why did we have to break the egg? Maybe there is some species of fowl that prefers to leave its egg in a sunny and somewhat congested spot, unattended. Maybe we did kill a poor little birdy. Ugh.

When we were leaving the store, the kids went back to look at the egg. Well, poke at the egg with a stick to be more exact. I felt too guilty to return to the scene of the crime and went over to our car. But my curiosity was still nagging at me. Where had that egg come from?

I looked down at the squat, dense little shrub that I had found the egg beside. My mind argued that there was no way anything could have a nest in there…it was too compact…too, well, bushy.

I looked under and saw the dim shape of another egg. I then pulled back a branch or two and saw the metallic blue feathers of a drake duck. I jumped back in surprise, half expecting the duck to fly out and attack me. It was a duck egg!

Some dimwitted duck had decided that a bush on the median beside the very first parking spot at Target was the perfect place to lay her eggs. I called the girls over and told them what I had discovered. I also told them to be respectful and quiet while they spied in the little bush to see the duck sitting on the eggs.

My youngest felt way better after that…she knew there was a nest with other eggs being watched over by daddy duck, and realized that what I told her was probably right. Mom had most likely abandoned a bad egg.

When we got home I had to look it up. I found article after article about ducks pushing eggs out of the nest for a variety of reasons, and I shared them with my girls. It made me feel a little bit better, but for some reason I still feel bad for that poor little ducky whose egg we cracked out of sheer curiosity.

I love ducks. I love how they waddle and quack and shake their little tail feathers. I love how they land on the water like little seaplanes, and how they stand tall and flap their wings.

It’s funny. I almost didn’t park in that spot. I was waiting for another parking place, but there was too much congestion in that aisle so I gave up and found another spot…a spot right in front, next to a freshly mulched little island. With a pale green egg.