Menage à Trois Bingo

So ursulav posted this morning about plausible ghost stories. I considered commenting, but these stories are pretty boring. Whether they're plausible or not, I couldn't say. I don't even believe in ghosts. But they're mine.

1. Shortly after Ray and I returned from the UK, his parent's dog Sam died. The next day, we were all sitting in the den and I heard the rattle of his collar from the next room. He had one of those chokechain collars that made a very distinctive rattle.

2. When I moved back into the house I live in now (after the divorce was final and I had bought out Ray's share of the house), several of my friends had inexplicable accidents (tripping over nothing, things like that) while visiting me, culminating in Jen falling off a ladder while helping me paint. I went and sat on the stairs to the second floor and had a conversation with the resident ghost. I told him/her/it that they were welcome to live in my house but I was going to be living there too, so we needed to make peace with each other and he/she/it was not to be hurting my friends. Uninvited visitors or burglars were fair game. After that the random accidents stopped.

Except that She Who Shall Not Be Named fell down the stairs one night while visiting me. Huh. Wonder whether my ghost was defending me preemptively?

1. In honor of Prop. H8 being overturned, I bring back the Hope icon. This morning I even had a surprisingly positive conversation with several coworkers who were also pleased by the outcome. Even in Missouri, folks, the world is changing.

2. Rosa just got back from Camp yesterday afternoon. I haven't seen her yet but I talked to her on the phone for a while and it sounds like she had a good time. She didn't enjoy canoeing but it was due more to the other girls in her canoe shrieking every time they wobbled than to the exercise.

3. Read Julian Comstock the other night. I requested it from the library after reading the thread on Making Light. It's well-written and frightening, the world-building is quite convincing, and I didn't like it. For several reasons: one, I can imagine a theocratic nightmare dystopia just fine for myself, and it's not a world I want to reside in even for the length of a book; two, preaching to the choir, dude!; three, I found the narrator's extreme and willful naivete annoying; four, hope-dashing ending.

4. This has been a very exhausting week. The city sent us a nastygram for excessive weeds in the back yard, and I spent most of Saturday, part of Sunday and part of Monday weeding. It's been the hottest week of the year, and I am only now recovering from all that exertion and the near heat prostration I suffered on Monday.

5. I got a shiny new computer at work on Tuesday, and suddenly I find the computer is actually waiting for me rather than the other way around. Wahoo!

We have some crazy and wonderful friends. Yesterday, one of them blogged this, and ever since I had seen the post I wondered whether she was referring to us and our house. So we were sort of expecting to find something unusual in our house when we got home from Iowa today...

First thing we saw:


And up in Tammie's office:


So of course, she popped it:


The signed confession:


Balloonacy!


More photos

I've washed my feet twice today, but they still feel dirty. Chris and Rosa and I spent the better part of the afternoon attempting to whip our backyard into some semblance of order. We put up a fence around the daylily bed that had been severely trodden by the dog, and along the fenceline that she has worn a path into, and surrounding the thornless blackberry bramble. We planted Rosa's Easter bulbs, two packets of snap peas and a metric butt-tonne of onions. Next week or the week after, we plan to get some tomatoes and maybe pole beans. The chainlink fence on the sidewalk side and the poultry fence on the grass side have got to be good for something, and what's better than training yummy veggies to grow on them?

Clematis, maybe: I used to have five of them growing up the chainlink fence; three are still alive and maybe I'll replace the other two.

Rosa made us ravioli for dinner, and then reannon and her Kiddo dropped by after their day out at Earth Day. tempesttea came later too, because Tammie called and said the word of Pudding at her.

We all played a round of "In a Pickle", which I had bought for Tammie for her birthday. Rosa won.

We don't really celebrate Easter at Rivendell, but we do like the chocolate bunnies and egg hunts. This year, we did a treasure hunt for Rosa, with clues in each egg. They went something like this:

1. Wrong holiday.
2. Black keys, white keys, no lock.
3. I'm on vacation, laying out on the beach.
4. Let's watch our boyfriend burn his eyebrows off!
5. No, I'm not an indoor swimming pool, why do you ask?
6. I'm big, I look like a bean. I might be filled with beans.
7. No one ever answers me.
8. Round and round and round I go. Where I stop, Puff the Magic Dragon knows.
9. The head bone connected to the neck bone, the neck bone connected to the rib bone...
10. You Donkey, me...
11. You Calvin, me...
12. Humans never look up. Where do birdies keep their eggs?

And there was a bucket of goodies hanging in the Japanese maple tree outside the front door.

Rosie was thrilled to bits.

I can't decide whether to be relieved, disgusted, angry, or all of those at once.

Remember the gas dryer that had sprung a gas leak? We replaced it with a fine old dryer acquired for $10 on Craigslist, that Chris and I installed a couple weeks ago. Then we put the bad one back in the van to be taken away somewhere. We were hoping to be able to sell it for a few bucks for scrap.

After Chris drove around all over town one day and found no one willing to buy it, he listed it yesterday on Freecycle. This morning, he took it out of the van and set it up in front of the garage. I saw it there when I left for work at 8:15ish.

At 10:00, he called to ask me whether I'd seen the dryer when I left. Sure, I said, it was right there.

"It's not there now." He'd thought maybe Tammie moved it. But no. Somewhere in that intervening hour and a half, someone stole our old dryer.

I can't help feeling like it ought to be a reportable crime. That I should call the police. But what are they going to do? "Well, what was its value?" "Nothing. It didn't work and we were giving it away."

All the thieves have really accomplished is to save us the trouble of helping some guy off Freecycle load it into his truck. And possibly, if they were to actually install it instead of (as is more likely) selling it for scrap, blowing themselves and their block to smithereens.

Still, I hate the idea that theft of possibly-valuable appliances has to be tolerated. How was anyone to know that the dryer was useless just from looking at its exterior?

Cleaning out the hexquarium in the back yard last night, I noticed a fire engine driving slowly down our street. "Hm," I shrugged to myself.

Tammie called out to them to find out what they wanted, but they sort of blew her off and continued on their way. Then they pulled into the alley and turned around, turning on their lights, and parked outside our yard. "Hm," I shrugged again.

Tammie was outside. They explained to her that someone had called saying they smelled smoke, and they were sent to investigate. Oh, and we're sorry we blew you off but you understand, we have to do our job. Yeah, I just guessed you might have been coming here. She showed them the hot tub and its stove and smokestack. Yes, the fire is nicely contained and not going anywhere. They were all very impressed by our set up; they went back and got the captain so he could see it too!

Tammie says we made the firehouse newsletter this month.

So the workers have been at the house today removing the first floor bathroom. They got the wall partly torn out where we were planning to put the new tub, and find that while the joists holding up the first floor run east-west, the ones holding up the second floor run north-south. So they said, "That's weird!" and stopped working until the general contractor can come out with someone tomorrow and determine whether the wall we'd wanted to remove is a load-bearing wall.

His response when they called was reportedly disbelief. "No way, houses aren't built like that!"

We're just glad they stopped *before* the back of the house fell off.

We have ducklings! We hadn't seen M. et Mme. l'Orange for some time, but yesterday Tammie and Rosa called me all excited to announce that Madame showed up with four ducklings in tow. They spent most of the day between the ground feeder and our pond. When I got home from work, they were still there. Nobody ran away at the approach of a car, nor of a human.
And lo and behold, while we were all watching, a fifth duckling appeared from out of nowhere (or maybe from under the feeder). Monsieur was nowhere to be seen; when I asked, Tammie said that Rosa had been asking about him all day, and that apparently mother ducks raise the young alone.

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Rosa started summer school on Monday ("Ready! Set! Go to Kindergarten!"). So far she has really been enjoying it. It's been rather an adjustment for us all, though; her class starts at eight a.m. We have to get up significantly earlier to get her snack made and all of her stuff together and get her to school on time, and we've had to change her bedtime commensurately. She's been pretty good about the change, thank gods.

In the afternoons, she's having her first swimming lessons. Finally. I've only been talking about sending her (taking her) to swimming lessons for the last four years! She loves it. I knew she would, after last summer at the lake where she practically grew gills.

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Well crap. As I'm writing this, I received a phone message from Armida. Rosa is very sick--high fever, tonsils inflamed, sore throat--and she is going to take her to the doctor.

We have fishes! Monday evening the three of us and Rosa went to Petsmart
across Manchester and bought five medium koi (about five inches long),
one solid yellow-orange, one black and white with an orange face, one
white and orange, one black and white with just a couple orange dots,
and oh-I-forget. We introduced them to the pond and tried feeding them
some pellets. No interest. Well, maybe they're tired and stressed out by
being moved. We also noticed that the waterfall was flowing much more
slowly than usual, so we took the filter pads out and cleaned them of a
thick layer of mud. The last rainfall had washed quite a bit of loose
dirt into the pond.

Tuesday evening we cleaned the filter yet again and tried to find the
fishies. They're all there, but they still haven't been seen to eat
anything, and they're spending all of their time lying in the rocks at
the bottom of the pond. I don't know whether that's because the water is
still chilly--it's been about 63 degrees in the morning, up to 75 in the
afternoon--or whether they're still stressed out, or there's too much
sun and they're seeking all the shade they can find, or there's a lot of
edible material in the layer of stuff at the bottom of the pond. But all
our resources say you can't starve them to death, so we're trying not to
worry. I do hope they come out soon and start exploring their new home.

If I remember, I should buy a couple oranges. Koi are said to like fresh
food, especially citrus and squash; the Petsmart near the City House had
a quarter orange and a slice of zucchini in each koi tank. The fish were
going nuts over it.

In other news, Tuesday morning we had *three* ducks. Not two parents and
a duckling, but three adult ducks (two drakes and a hen). Most of the
time there are still only two; the third might have been an interloper
trying to steal Madame l'Orange away from Monsieur. There's at least one
set of ducklings over on the loch but apparently *our* ducks have none.

We have a batch of goslings at the loch as well. Not at our house, but
down by the corner at Manchester, I saw a pair of Canada geese and
at least five fuzzy yellowish goslings. Tammie has counted seven, but I
was driving past on my way to work and did not see them long enough to
get a good count.