Happy Mothers' Day!

Yes, I know, there are only 16 minutes remaining, but it's been a busy day. This is my first opportunity to put my feet up and surf a little bit.

Saturday was a first for me. The Home & School Association held a Mothers' Day plant sale on Friday. My kids came home with a lovely selection of flowers that needed to be planted, and I decided that I wasn't going to put them in large pots as I had in years past. Thanks to the help of a local garden shop (the same, in fact, that supplied the flowers for the H&S sale), I actually dug out a spot at the base of our lamppost, and Mighty B. helped me plant everything Saturday morning. It looks really nice.

Yes, I could have used the biiiiig flower beds on the side of the house or in the front yard, the ones I've been working on, but it seemed silly to plant eleven little plants in such a huge space. And I've been wanting something by the lamppost for a while.

I just hope that they don't freeze tonight. And I hope Knucklehead doesn't trample them. She's already run through the bed twice, kicking up mulch. Oh. She buried one of my gardening gloves too. I can't find it anywhere. I just hope it's not under the flowers.

The second grade at the kids' school celebrated First Holy Communion yesterday. Today, all the kids were asked to return in their Communion clothes for the 9:00 a.m. mass, and we served goodies to the kids and their parents in the church hall afterward. Tradition has it that the first-grade parents help with the reception, since our kids will be making this sacrament next year.

My job was to pick up sticky buns, two big boxes each containing a 24 x 36 sheet of sticky buns. Lordy, they smelled divine. They were decorated with white, pink, and blue frosting (gurk!). Why, oh why, do you feed a bunch of eight-year-old children dressed in expensive all white clothing pink and blue frosting?

The frosting was a good thing for me, though, because it kept me from eating the sticky buns. (It did not, however, stop me from buying a butter cake while I was in the bakery. It's probably the best butter cake we've ever eaten.)

In the afternoon, we made dinner for my in-laws. Yeah, I know. People say I shouldn't have to cook on Mothers' Day. It wasn't actually planned as a Mothers' Day dinner. The Oracle and my FIL wanted to talk some stuff over, and I offered dinner as a way to make that happen. During the week it's too crazy and he doesn't get a chance to stop by their house. Anyway, I love to cook. I like it much better than housework. Much to my relief, The Oracle handled the bulk of the crisis cleaning while I was at the church. AND he peeled the potatoes. I hate peeling potatoes. If I could get away with mashing 'em with the skins on, I would. My in-laws brought lemon meringue and apple crumb pies for dessert. YUM!!!

In addition to the flowers from the plant sale, my kids treated me to the neatest stuff.

Mighty B. painted a heart-shaped wooden pin and decorated it with foam stickers. He also made a card and a little booklet outlining my (his?) favorite recipe and a booklet of coupons for things like setting the table and picking up without being asked. (Of course, if I present the coupon, doesn't that mean I'm asking him to do it?) He made all this cool stuff in school.

Precious Daughter also made a card ("Mom, U rock!"), and in her class she made a "snow globe." It's a 16 oz. plastic bottle of water heavily dosed with multicolored glitter. Inside is a laminated picture of Precious Daughter. It's really cool, but there's something weird about shaking my daughter upside-down to swirl the glitter around.

All in all, it was a fun day.

Punctuation Vent

I've noticed that when I start going stir crazy, it's due in part to an astonishing lack of leisure reading. You'd think I'd get my share with all the books my kids read, because I make sure to read everything they do. Now that they're getting older, the selection is getting better. I just finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Anyway, I've started reading Dark of the Moon by John Sandford. Several years ago, E introduced me to John Sandford and the Prey novels and I really enjoyed them. I have, however, lost complete track of which ones I've read, and he's written a number of them since I fell out of the Sandford habit. I need to do some homework before signing out another, because nothing irks me more than tucking into what I think is a new (to me) book and discovering that I already know the ending.

So, anyway, Dark of the Moon isn't part of the Prey series, but it branched off Prey and became another series all its own. I didn't know that, either, but I'll get over it. I like to read a series in order because the later stories tend to reference the former, and I hate having a surprise spoiled.

I'm anal retentive with commas and punctuation. I have to be in my line of work. If you sent me a letter with misplaced commas and such, I really don't care. You're taking the time to write me, and I'm happy for it. I know I'm miles away from perfect on this blog, too. It's hard to catch mistakes when you're nose is in it from beginning to end, but I'm not paying for someone to proofread my blog, and I'm not making anyone pay to read it. I think it matters when people are paying for what you've written, whether it's a lawyer paying for my transcripts or an author charging for his novels.

Sandford, in my opinion, needs to slap his editor or his proofreader or whoever it is that allowed this book to reach the store shelves. If he insisted on publishing exactly what I'm reading, then HE needs to be slapped. I'm barely sixty pages into it, and my eyes hurt from all the comma oddities.

Let's have a grammar lesson, shall we?

Sentences involve two types of clauses, the dependent clause and the independent clause.

The independent clause is exactly that. It's independent. It is complete with a subject and a verb. "I went to the store." It can stand on its own as a sentence or be joined to another with a comma followed by a coordinating conjuction (, and) or by use of a semicolon (;).

A dependent clause is one that is not complete. It needs something to finish it off. It has to depend on something else to make it whole. "Before I went swimming." Please read that aloud. It feels unfinished, doesn't it? Before you went swimming...what? What did you do? The thought is incomplete.

(Bear with me. We're getting close to why I'm so annoyed and why I can't read another page of this novel until I get this out of my system.)

Using my sample phrases, you may or may not use a comma to join them together and make a complete sentence.

"I went to the store before I went swimming." No comma required.
"Before I went swimming, I went to the store." Comma required.

DO NOT write, "I went to the store, before I went swimming" unless you plan to add more information. "I went to the store, before I went swimming, and bought a bottle of waterproof sunscreen."

In this case, "before I went swimming" is bracketed by commas because it's information that's not essential to the sentence "I went to the store and bought a bottle of sunscreen." You can pluck out that clause between the commas and still have a grammatically-correct sentence.

So, why is John Sandford's book driving me crazy?

1. I busted him for robbery, when I was a deputy. This one is simple. Dump the comma and it's fine.
2. Her name is Margaret Laymon and she called me up, about five minutes ago. This one is really irksome. When two independent clauses are separated by a coordinating conjunction (and, but, or, for, no, so, yet), a comma is placed before the conjunction. The rule isn't hard and fast. If the clauses are short, you can drop the comma. Her name is Margaret Laymon and she called me up. That's fine until you reach "about five minutes ago." Now it's a long clause and needs a comma, and that comma belongs before "and." Her name is Margarget Laymon, and she called me up about five minutes ago.
3. Yes, and he's got several parcels of good land down south of here, that'll be a nice chunk of cash. "That'll be a nice chunk of cash" has no business being tied to that sentence with only a comma and no conjunction. It either needs to stand on its own as a separate sentence or be joined with a semicolon. Yes, and he's got several parcels of good land down south of here; that'll be a nice chunk of cash.
4. The creeks and ditches sometimes collected into larger streams, usually a snaky line of oxbows cut a few dozen feet deep in the soil; and sometimes into marshes or shallow lakes. This one is like skewers to my eyeballs. I understand that the effort is to describe the larger streams as "oxbows," and the clause running from "usually" to "soil" isn't critical to the sentence. The creeks and ditches sometimes collected into larger streams and sometimes into marshes or shallow lakes. I simply don't "get" what that semicolon is for. My senses tell me it should be a comma. If you're really worried about confusing your reader with all those commas, you can use dashes. The creeks and ditches sometimes collected into larger streams -- usually a snaky line of oxbows cut a few dozen feet deep in the soil -- and sometimes into marshes or shallow lakes.

Ahhhhhh, that's better. Thank you. Maybe I'll be able to enjoy the next sixty pages this book instead of getting constantly poked in the eye with crappy punctuation.

Eggs

This post by E triggered a few thoughts, and since I've neglected my blog so badly I thought they'd be worth sharing. (Shoot, anything that gets me here and writing is probably worth sharing.)


In the mid '90s, I worked at a business that sold freshly-made pasta. Their pasta was wonderfully light, and that lightness was due to the dozens of eggs that went into each batch of pasta. E mentions that double-yolked eggs are an unusual occurrence. I guess they are, but we got plenty of them at the pasta place. I guess they weigh in differently or something, and that's how they get boxed up for foodservice use.


Whenever I can, I prefer to buy organic eggs. One afternoon, I approach the dairy section and am dismayed to see a slightly disheveled-looking man poking about in several opened boxes of organic eggs. This really annoyed me, because I didn't want some stranger's hands in what could be my box of eggs. Yeah, I know, several people had already handled them before they wound up in their little cardboard box.


I asked him what he was doing. It seems he was perplexed by the many different shades of brown in the organic egg boxes, and he was trying to find a box with eggs that were all the same color.

Ummm...

Just Me, Myself, and I

Every morning, The Oracle is the first to rise. He has his breakfast and nudges me awake just before he gets into the shower. On a good day, I stumble out to the kitchen and prepare lunches, periodically wearing a path from the kitchen to the kids' rooms to rouse them for school and check on their progress. It's a frustrating thing to spend ten minutes in the kitchen only to find them in exactly the same position ten minutes later. Once The Oracle finishes showering, he enters the nag fest. Every morning he winds up taking a train later than the one he's supposed to catch at 7:20.

On a not-so-good day, I fall back to sleep and end up with a justifiably-snappish Oracle when he gets out of the shower, because everybody's going to be late, not just him.

I gleefully stuff the kids onto the bus at 7:45 and thank Heaven all that nonsense is over; by 1:30 I miss them and want them to come home, and I spend the next ninety minutes watch the clock and listening for the bus. I fight the temptation to sign them out early.
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I'm turning into my mother. We all knew that would happen, right? Last night was just another symptom in a long string of habits I've developed. I got the notion to bake a loaf of bread. I tried it the other day and it didn't rise (The yeast might've been too old despite the expiration date) and I was annoyed about that, so I had to try again. I took it out of the oven at 1:00 this morning. The house smelled wonderful.

Anyway, my mother used to do this stuff all the time. She was a chronic insomniac; she also smoked. (And a long string of stuff leads me to believe she probably had Fibromyalgia, but that'll take too long here.) When she couldn't sleep, she'd sit at her countertop "throne" and watch a late-late-late movie. If she woke up for a cigarette, she never gave in to the temptation to have a smoke in bed and wandered out to the kitchen for her dose of nicotine. Either way, when she found herself in the kitchen, her fingers itched for something to do, and that something logically surrounded cooking. She loved to cook, and I often woke to wonderful smells in the house. Once she woke me up with a plate of warm cookies under my nose.
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Her Nibs was up rather late last night. She didn't go to bed until 11:00, and she only went because I put her in her crib and shut the door. Even she knew she was pooped, I think, because she only chatted with her stuffed monkey for a minute before collapsing in exhaustion. She barely moved from where I found when I went to bed last night. She hadn't even kicked the covers off her legs. She's all peaceful and mushy-looking, and I want to hug her, but I don't want to disturb her, either.
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Last week, I started taking daily morning walks with two other mommies in my neighborhood. One does most of the talking and I really don't mind since I don't know her that well. She b---hes about her husband sometimes and that makes me appreciate mine. Today, however, I'm missing my morning walk because her Nibs is still asleep. The mommies take four laps by my house, so I'm hoping she'll wake up and I can jump in for at least a partial walk. Is that selfish?
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Really, mornings like this are rare. It's just me and the Knucklehead (who is very wet from rolling in God knows what - ick) and my coffee. I actually get to enjoy my coffee semi hot for once.
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A friend of mine is having some tests done over the next couple weeks; please please please say a few prayers or send some good karma or positive thoughts for clean, benign results. Thank you.
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I miss my friends. I haven't seen E in ages. It's been even longer since I've seen M or S, and I'm starting to feel a little stir crazy. I think this is one reason why I spend so much time on CrackBook. It gives me a sense of connection with my friends when I don't have a physical one. Still, nothing beats face-to-face conversation, and for that I'm downright starved. If it weren't for The Oracle and my morning walks with my neighbors, I'd be locked up somewhere for talking to myself too much.
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I haven't had a deposition in nearly three weeks. The last deposition prior to that was in February. This ain't no way to supplement the household income. As a result, I've been looking for some third-shift work close to home. It's surprising to see how little of that there is.

Why third shift? Because I won't need baby-sitters, and if I actually DO have a deposition I can still take the work. Court reporting is where I want to be, and my family has sacrificed a lot for me to have it.

I have my eye on a prolific convenience-store chain (way to aim high!), and I'm hoping they come through. I've applied for some other stuff, too. Wish me luck.
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Oooooh! Her Nibs is awake!! I love it best when my kids are fresh out of bed.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

I have so much to do and so little ambition.

The houses in my neighborhood were built with two traditional areas for flower beds. One is along the side of the garage, and the other occupies a large amount of square footage in front of the house. Our property is on a hill, so there's even a stone retaining wall that wraps around the flower bed to the side of the house.

My flower beds are weed beds. When it comes to the great outdoors, I have no gardening knowledge or skill. It shows, too. My flower beds don't contain flowers. They contain weeds. Lots and lots of weeds in varying sizes, colors, and unpleasantness.

Two weeks ago, I ordered 3.5 cubic yards of mulch. I tackled the "easy" weed bed which had been professionally cleared five or six years ago and covered with weed barrier and mulch. In our typical fashion, we never bought more mulch and the weeds took hold and took over. I cleared it out, laid more barrier, and shucked several loads of mulch to the bed with the wheelbarrow.

The weed-bed by the garage all but cries out for attention. A number of years back -- prior to the professionals doing the other -- we put down a layer of weed barrier and I-can't-remember-how-many pounds of stone. It wasn't quite enough to do the job, but one thing led to another and we never looked back. The weeds -- shockingly enough -- returned.

Our grand idea is to take out the stone and use it around the air conditioner instead. It's a smaller area and can be generously covered with the stone we have, and covered deeply enough to keep the stupid weeds at bay.

So I started trying to remove the stone. What a joke. They're a bit too small to scrape out with a rake, and the rake snags on the weed barrier. We don't have a hoe. My only other tool is a shovel with a short handle. I can't dig down or the shovel snags on the weed barrier which is still in surprsingly good condition. It's years of dirt that blew into the stones that hosted all the weeds. Oh, and they grew up between where the sheets of barrier overlapped but I ran out of the spikes intended to hold it down.

Aaaaanyway, I can't stand up straight to shovel, so I have to hunch over and scrape the stones off with the shovel nearly parallell to the ground. The blade of the shovel is narrow and doesn't hold much. The work takes forever. My back and shoulders and hamstrings hurt from hunching over. Waaaah.

When I mulched the easy weed bed, I got the brilliant idea to use some of the stones to edge an area of mulch that has no wall. The problem is that the stones are full of dirt and weeds, and I don't want to go polluting my freshly-mulched bed with weeds from the garage.

I know! I'll just rinse the dirt off the stones!

Easier said than done, but through lots of trial and error and lots more water, I managed to get the worst of the garbage out of the stones. I quit for the day and go inside.

I haven't been back out to work on it since, and it's been nearly two weeks. Weeds are growing out of the rocks piled on the pathway that leads to the backyard, and water is puddling in the tarp beneath the mulch. I need to get it out of there before it starts breeding mosquitoes.

But, ugh, I have no motivation.

Happy Belated Easter!

There really isn't much to report in PB and Bacon Land. My kids were shorted a day and a half from their Easter break because the school district used too many unnecessary snow days. Normally the kids enjoy a half day Wednesday, they're off Holy Thursday and Good Friday, and then they're off Easter Monday as well.

This year, the Wednesday was a full day and school resumed Monday. Judging by the population on the school bus we missed Monday morning, a lot of parents didn't know this or a lot of kids -- not just mine -- overslept.

One notable tidbit is that I escaped the tedium of dyeing eggs this year. I mean, I like to dye eggs and so do the kids, but I hate what happens after.

You see, my kids not only must color at least six eggs each (gotta have one of every color), they stake a claim on their artistic labors. Nobody in this house eats hard-cooked eggs except me, but I am not allowed to eat their dyed eggs. If I do, they scream like I'm devouring a beloved family pet.

Last Easter, I smuggled a few of the eggs out the door to my FIL, who also likes a little egg salad once in a while, and I was given the Third Degree when the eggs' absence was discovered the next day. I had the nerve to eat one for lunch and was harrassed so badly that I let the others rot in the fridge until they were forgotten (Independence Day) and discarded them.

This year, my kids wanted to dye eggs, but guess what!!?? The Oracle had the car, and I had no dye!! (cue: evil laughter) We'll skip over the part where I probably could have adapted my paste colors for frosting to dyeing eggs, but they didn't ask, and I didn't offer.

What's even more remarkable is that nobody noticed. On Sunday night, Precious Daughter casually mentioned, "Hey, we didn't dye any eggs this year." Mighty B. didn't even flinch.

Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself

An old friend of mine blogged this article. I simply had to share even though I'm pretty sure that on this blog I'm "preaching to the choir."