Enslaved By Boy Scouts

It's Mulch Delivery Day.  I was forced to get up at 6 AM, which is almost physically painful for me, because it is still dark at that hour.  Lest you look down on me for my weakness, please consider that I spent 18 years or so being woken up every single night by one child or another, often more than once, while still rising out of bed bright-eyed and optimistic by 7,  at the latest.

In other words, I am DONE.

You've got mulch!

So, Mulch Day.  We were up and out by 7, setting up the food tent, feeding breakfast to some very cold Scouts, generally getting things organized.  Then I sped off to yoga, where I hurried up and relaxed for an hour and a half, before picking up my 2 neglected girls at home so we could head off to help at Mulch again, where Larry (the Mulch Czar, remember?) assigned me to play traffic cop.

My job involved preventing people from parking in the parking lot we had rented, no small feat considering there was a huge Tae Kwon Do exhibition going on at the high school and approximately gazillion games and scrimmages taking place on the playing fields. I spent a lot of time explaining to distraught parents that their precious soccer players would be just fine if they dropped them off at this end of the parking lot and allowed them to walk ALL THE WAY across the tarmac to reach their teammates.

I was relieved of my duties because I was starting to get sarcastic.  Who knew?

So I brought the girls home to play for a couple of hours, but we are due back down there soon to take our shift handing out grilled cheese sandwiches and replenishing granola bars and grapes at the snack station.  What can I say? It's a glamorous life, this existence of mine. And tomorrow, I might just get to sleep in until 7.

What more could a middle-aged gal with sleep-deprivation PTSD ever want?

Lesson Learned

A few months ago, I was feeling nostalgic for my younger days, when my friends and I would sit around the barracks and play cribbage to while away the time.  Remember, this was in the dark ages, before anyone even knew what the Internet was and hardly anyone had a screen of his/her own.  I think we sang along to The Traveling Wilbury's as we played.  So, yeah, a LONG time ago...

Anyway, I located a cheap cribbage board and, having managed to decipher the instructions, convinced Susie (who likes to play games, unlike most of her siblings, who unfortunately take after Larry in this regard) to play with me.  Susie took to the game like a fish to water, displaying a surprising facility for counting hands and computing odds.  I played with her any chance I got, because...um...homeschooling. And maths.

My Christmas present

We upgraded at Christmas to an honest-to-goodness professional board, complete with unbreakable metal pegs and a sliding top that hid a storage compartment for the cards and such.  A beauty, really. During the Great Homewrecking of Winter 2015, our handyman noticed this cribbage board and said, "Oh, hey! Do you play? I love that game - used to play for a nickel a point."

Hmmm, I thought.  Here's a good chance to show Susie that gambling doesn't really pay. "Hey, Susie," I said, to my unsuspecting youngest. "Do you want to play for money?" She agreed, happily, and I proceeded on my mission to show her that probability and luck tend to even out for two players of similar abilities.  Because, hey, I am at least as smart as a 9-year-old.

Except...not.  Turns out, Susie is REALLY GOOD at cribbage.  Long story short, over the past month? Susie has netted 15 dollars.

15 DOLLARS.

And now she thinks gambling is an awesome way to earn money.

Feeling Green

Still alive, just too busy to write. And believe me, THAT'S busy. I'm telling you, this being-an-adult gig is for the birds. I am just keeping my eyes fixed on this coming Monday, when I can go back to my customary lackadaisical approach to life.

Well, except for that taxes thing - I'll still have to take care of that.

Anywhoo, St. Patrick's Day has passed unmarked here this year. Due to the unfortunate corned-beef-and-cabbage barfing incident of 2014, no one seems to want to ingest our traditional St. Patrick's Day dinner ever again.

Oh, wow, I went to link to a post about that night a year ago when I stayed up to watch Brian repeatedly deposit regurgitated corn beef into our barf bucket, and I realized that I have never regaled you with that particular tale. I know you're disappointed.

Oh, well, never mind. Be sure to enjoy those St. Patrick's Day leftovers tomorrow, though! Yum.

Peter Pan May Have Had The Right Idea

These look cute, but they're killers.

Life is getting the better of  me the last two days and sapping my blogging energy, as it were.  Oh, nothing dramatic, no fear - just a zillion and one smaller things.  I am being pecked to death by ducks, essentially.  But I needed to pop in to let you know that Larry has finally caught the mouse (or, at least, a mouse).  The trap that disappeared a few nights ago is still missing, however, so the mystery continues.  Larry theorizes that there is still a dead mouse lying somewhere under our kitchen cabinets.  I'm sure the smell will start during Mulch Weekend, when we have zero time to do anything about it.

But hey, at least we'll have hot water this year - there's that.

Yes, one of the zillion and one things coming up is the Boy Scout troop's Mulch Delivery Weekend, which situation is just as bad as last year - Larry in charge of mulch, myself in charge of food, neither of us talking to the other in the interest of preserving our marriage past the next 10 days. It's like one of those survival reality shows, only less fun and more real.

And then there is our HOA annual meeting coming up, which promises to be replete with scintillating experiences, such as explaining to my neighbors why we exceeded the budget line item for legal advice and listening to normally rational people almost come to blows over how exactly to plow the snow in our parking lot. I also, in preparation, got to spend an hour today talking to a landscape guy about mulch and lawn fertilizer; that is, when I wasn't on the phone discussing the details of a contract for neighborhood trash pick-up with a very nice woman who no doubt wondered why I was being allowed to handle such things.

Remember when you wanted to be all grown up?  Turns out, it's not all it was cracked up to be.  Not even close.


[Duck image: The Telegraph]

Bargaining Points

Still haven't found that darn mouse, in case you are wondering. Larry theorizes that it went under the kitchen cabinets to die. I might just demand a whole new kitchen at this point.

In the meantime, that horrid event known as Daylight Saving Time happened. I've been getting up an hour late ever since because why not? It's not as if I'm ruining my illustrious career as a stay-at-home mom and unpaid blogger to do so.

So the problem, actually, is my crappy cheap phone. I noticed midday Sunday that it hadn't automatically reset. So I figured out (okay, someone helped me, but I was the one who pushed all  the buttons) how to move the clock on my phone ahead one hour, and then I forgot all about it. Until a couple of hours later, when this message popped up on my phone screen: Time change detected. Reset your phone? with a Yes and a No option.

Well, that would have been helpful, several hours ago, I thought, and pressed No.

A few hours later it happened again.  And then again. And again. In fact, it's still doing it.

So, what now? Do I move my clock back one hour and wait for the offer to reappear? Will that make it stop? But what if I move the clock back and then the offer doesn't show up again? What if it has already given up? How will I know whether or not it is going to reappear? How long do I wait?

This is the sort of thoughts that plague me, as I go about my uneventful, humdrum days. And I wonder, what do busy people do? How do they have time to figure out their phones, and Daylight Saving, and the intersection thereof? Does Hillary Clinton have an assistant for this sort of thing? Does that Lean In chick hire someone to take care of her clocks so she has more time to, you know, lean in?

Or maybe successful women pay more than, say, $40 for their cellphones. Yeah, that might be it. I wonder, is a dead mouse under the kitchen cabinets a good spousal negotiating point for a cellphone upgrade? Because I doubt I am going to get that new kitchen...