Buttercream Solves

Sometimes....you didn't get enough sleep

the air mattress has your tailbone on the floor for the last two hours

the cat is scraping a pen cap across the room and it makes

just enough noise

pms fist-pumps a hello

monday wants to know what sized shoe you want up your ass

the other cat wants to be fed at 4am

the child drops (yet another) glass of milk

on the floor and this time 

the glass actually shatters

and out of principle you make her clean it

and that means you have to drive her to school

because the second it hit the floor you only had 

two ticking minutes to get to the bus stop 

and she's terrible at cleaning and 

when frustrated, super terrible at taking instruction

and you remind her to get every drop up first

NO you can't SWEEP liquid and glass

YES, wet another paper towel!

you have to get all the sugars off the floor

from the almond milk

or the cats will lick it and get worms

my mother put the fear of God's worms in me

when I was a child

I imagined them falling out of the cat's butt 

like sneaky confetti

every single time it was near my pillow 

or even just in the house

and would obsessively look for anything 

small, white and wiggly

Sometimes kids get frustrated and yell back

and then the parent has to remain alpha

or else the terrorists win 

points are proven, (but not really)

and angry tears of a teenager

tell you how mean you are for making her

cry over spilled milk

and you tuck your horns into the car

when ducking in 

because you are obviously an ogre 

that managed to reproduce a fair princess

in distress

It haunts you all day long

you wait for the after school call 

as you work and it finally comes

and the greeting is as bright and happy as it always is

you both apologize and the world is nearly right

until you bring cupcakes home with 

vanilla buttercream frosting and sprinkles

and the final touch lights the world

once again

Sweets, Books and Lingering Dreams...In Pictures

It's been a sweet couple of days that turned sour on the Flip front.  Oh, should I have warned you all to sit down first before divulging such surprise?

I decided yesterday to just enjoy what I could do.  It's time to pay rent and it's going to be another peanut butter and jelly two week extravaganza, marked intermittently with cooking beans from scratch to mix with oil and salt or mash for sandwiches.  So the Teen and I headed out for neighborhood treasures.

The library  Where else can I touch and take home super old books for free?

I took this book with me on my journey to Arizona last year via Amtrak.  I read two of the stories in it.  I would have read more but the scenery had almost my full attention.  Note to self: 20 lbs of books on a cross country journey is one reason to actually like the thought of a Kindle.

Apparently, no one has been interested in taking this book home since I brought it back.  That's like being on match.com for a year with no hits.  

Neighborhood autumn flowers have arrived.  One great benefit of living in a downtown area.  The storefronts have to keep up a certain decorative code to make it quaint.

Browsing the specialty stores made us hungry.  I'd have bought some of these for $2.50 each but we were saving our sweet tooth for another stop.

Discovering the world of the Music Box with the tiny ballerina.  Put it on your Christmas list, kid.

This is exactly what we had in mind.  This place would look even cuter in the 1800s without the power lines behind it.  What can we get for $2.50?

Decadent, not gritty, frosting.  Mmmmm.....Perfect.  The cake was delicious as opposed to being the Other Half to be Put up with while eating with bites of frosting to be sure it's not too dry.  Not here.  Cake was delish!

Good fences make good neighbors.  Especially if they plant flowers all over the dang thing so that our attention is diverted.

I miss this.  The tracks to a great person.  Hope someday to reconnect.

Red Velvet Crumbs and a Mockingbird

Tonight we had the best and baddest mama jamma of a storm. We aren’t prone to worrying about tornados and the like in my area. Well, we weren’t anyway. Until that crazy tornado in Springfield, Mass last week. NOW we believe in ghosts.

The way home from work was brutal….visibility only allowing the ability to see a huge tree in the road right as you were about to drive over it. Lightning streaking down the sky constantly, strobing the town in a steady tempo. And of course, plenty of sirens to make us all pull over, wondering what the scene would be like, wherever that EMT was headed to.

So I know that I have this love for crows and all but our animals in the house are trying to get into the act. They’ve heard that a group of crows is a murder and are attempting to be the villainous bad asses of this hood. Le chat Azrael and le chien Ziggy both had their evil moments today. Azrael first, strutting around the house with a dead chipmunk. She is probably the single highest cause of Chipmunk Mortality around here. Not cool. She doesn’t even eat them. Ziggy took out a woodchuck who tried to defend himself. That makes me even sadder….an animal wanting to live and trying to stay alive and losing. But I guess that’s life and its opposite, Compost. I hear there were entrails involved with the woodchuck incident. SHIVER.

Today was a crazy day at work…one in which you dearly wish you had a beautiful Japanese or Chinese partition to close your little piece of pod real estate off and not speak to anyone. I have fabulous workmates…I just need quiet sometimes to work. And today we were all interrupted to the nth because our boss really wanted to know when this or that might be worked on, creating and slamming panic buttons wherever possible, like that landmine game. This doesn’t keep a flow going to finish the job. It just creates more fires to put out.

Regardless, I had a nice radio day. NPR decided that in all likelihood, its stories were not what I needed today and would not play for me. So I thought I’d check out some living in France podcasts, perchance some also on crows and ravens. So I did. I will have to reach out to a couple of those crow guys to see if they’ll be on my Scorpion Equinox show. One is Tony Angell and the other is John Marzluff. They wrote a book called In the Company of Crows and Ravens.

I lost my batting streak on MLB yesterday. I’d been up to a 7. This means I’m sort of a big deal (Not.). It really means that I guessed seven days in a row who would get a hit in baseball. Suzuki, how could you let me down? Now my boyfriend is beating me! Or….I’m getting a head start on my new streak so that by the time his crumbles, he’ll be behind me. Wah hahahahaha….
So to make me feel happier, Farmville decided that we could plant cupcakes. Which I did promptly. I am part of the ecstatic nerdville that is a committed farmer. I can’t let down my neighbors, nor can I let my crops wither (it’s a waste of my virtual cash!). So cupcakes it is. J’adore cupcakes. I am sure to eat one at least once a week. We have a great bakery in the area, McKinney and Doyle, and wow, talk about lookers. Those cupcakes could be rocks with frosting and I’ll eat them. I usually share one with Humanling on Tuesdays. I don’t know about her but I end up with red velvet crumbs all over my lap like an animal.

So tonight I decided to do yoga since it was still lightning out during my usual walking and cavorting with the crows time slot. I haven’t done a full yoga routine since I started walking during our lovely weather and boy, it was a task. My balance was all ragged. Note to self: do not ignore yoga or else it will make the joke out of me that I am once cold weather comes.
Eventually I decided to grab a plastic bag and take my Year in Provence book, along with camera and Murder Treats (ok really one faithful crow does not comprise a murder but he did lead 2 of his family to me a couple of days ago and they were fed too.)

Now I’ve noticed that there are a couple of other Birdie Cues out there that let me know Crow is around. Mockingbird is one of them. He starts with his bizarre Rehhhhhhh Rehhhhhhhh noise which I usually hear when Crow and I are in the same area. Mockingbird dive bombs Crow constantly and Crow, being the (much) bigger of the two doesn’t even bother to kick his ass. He just continues to get pelted and shows some patience. So when I heard Mockingbird’s Rehhhhhhhh tonight as I headed out of the driveway, I saw Crow also. I put down some vittles and left the driveway. I have a feeling that Mockingbird is very territorial over the driveway area so Crow instead flew to one of its tree posts that I normally feed him under. I happened to get a photo of the attempted dive bomb because I enjoy taking photos of Crow whenever possible (see above photo). Crow then flew down to eat.

On my way back to the house, my mile almost up, it had started raining again and I decided to just do one mile tonight instead of two. Red-Winged Blackbird is the other messenger to let me know that Crow is around. RWB started making noise and also dive bombing Crow. Very patient Crow, who simply wants to eat peanuts and cheerios and crackers. And almonds this time around.

So tonight I tried to teach Crow a word….”Once Around This Time”. Ok that’s a phrase but it might sound like a giant syllabic word to Crow. The rain, of course. Tomorrow I will lap 2 miles and feed him again.

See you tomorrow Crow. For now I see that my older one, Miz Eye, has sent me a request in Farmville. A first. Of course in the exuberance of sharing something you like with one of your very favorite people, I have already sent a gift back with a long paragraph telling her to friend my Farmville Friends, with footnotes.