Wailing Away in Mousketeerville

Our cats are indoor cats. To them mice are pink and fluffy and stuffed with hallucinogenic drugs. The Christmas catnip toy is still making the rounds through the living room, around the laundry basket, and under the kitchen table. Showing these guys a real mouse is like showing me a Prada bag. It’s fetching when compared to say, a wheelbarrow full of biological recyclables, but basically impractical for every day use.

So imagine my surprise, this year when I got a mouse for my birthday.

He wasn’t exactly a gift; more of a petite party crasher with a Hulk-sized case of the munchies. I was suspicious when I found the bag of Meow Mix under the sink had enough holes chewed in it to look like paper bag chicken pox. But when I saw a furry little flasher dart across the top of my kitchen cabinet, the festivities began.

I realized right then that “The Night Before Christmas” book is pure fiction. “Not a creature was stirring” is the biggest bundle of propaganda since the “new improved McRib” travesty.

It’s not that I have anything against mice. I’m Mickey’s biggest fan. But if a furry little guy dashes through my kitchen without benefit of red shorts, white gloves, or even a T-Shirt endorsement contract, I’m not going to be chiming in with “Why? Because we like you!”

In our house we favor the catch and release program for nature’s little trespassers. That’s because we are benevolent rodetarians. The Captain of our little drydock ark calls it something else under his breath as he’s balancing on a kitchen chair to capture random moths, grasshoppers, and lady bugs with a paper cup. He greeted the new visitor with appropriate felicitations.

Then off he went to the Big Store on the Corner to bring home a humane trap. Humane is another word for living off h’ors d’oeuvres at our expense. He brought home enough groceries to feed the mouse masses in Hell’s Kitchen. I suspect some of the items are for the hunter as well as the hunted.

Just now this little guy is pushing the limits of our hospitality. So far he’s turned up his whiskers at every item we have on the menu known to entice little mice appetites, and I’m losing patience, not to mention the few ounces of water weight from the first sighting. If I want to Give a Mouse a Cookie, I’m going to get a picture book, not a reality show.

I realize it’s my birthday, and if excitement is what makes a party, one tiny mouse will do the trick.

But all in all, when it comes to special occasion seek and destroy missions, I prefer a nice card to shock and awe.

Doggerel Days

Once upon a weekend sunny
Tried to think of something funny
Searching through lines of illegible notes.
While I scrambled, thumbing pages
Looking for the laugh of ages
Came there then a scratching sound
Pawing at the kitchen door.
“Darn the doggies evermore!”

I was deep in concentration
Humor lost to contemplation
Dialogue from his Playstation
Which as parents we deplore
Curious, stilted conversation
Made me chuckle even more.

Then the doggies made their entrance
As it is in every instance
Muddy feet on my clean floor
Paws and tails were wildly flailing
Patience in persistence failing
I succumbed to waily wailing
As they muddied up the floor.
“Darn the doggies evermore!”

I lost my pen and grabbed a pencil
Wrote a tale with hands prehensile
Shining like the Christmas tinsel
Of the doggies at the door.
Lashing through the kitchen wildly
Hit a spot to put it mildly
Slid across the kitchen floor.
Dog ballet; I laughed still more
They crashed into the outside door
Thank the doggies for this lore!

School's In, I'm Out

I have a friend who can tell when school starts by how many of her kids get sick. If somebody throws up, mark your calendars for cafeteria duty because school is in session.

My kids are older now, but there are still definite clues that let me know it’s time to obey the speed limit between the flashing yellow signs. I can tell school is in by the vacuum in my wallet. If I try to put a dollar in the bill section and it hits a jet stream that carries it directly to a slow-moving boy dragging $400.00 worth of school books across the kitchen floor toward the back door, classes have started.

My guys go to community college across town. At least I think it’s a college. The way they hit me up for lunch money, I’m beginning to suspect they are supporting the efforts of a five start restaurant. Any day now, I’m expecting to catch one of them sneaking up the back stairs after dark with crème brulee on his breath.

Schedules are different at college. When the kids were in grade school, I could count on at least six hours a day without having to watch a Barney video or share my Girl Scout cookies with anybody except the dog. These days, young people blow in and out of my house at random intervals, changing my easy-listening radio station to brain-twister funk, and killing larger than life video game zombies on my big screen TV. It’s hard to keep up, but I’m not entirely sure all the kids that come through my living room are original family members. In my heart of hearts I believe we upgraded to the Supersized Family Plan when math class let out.

Now I find out that my guys will be done with this semester a month before Christmas. That means I’ll have to spend the time I had budgeted for wringing my hands and begging Santa for travelers checks by restocking the refrigerator and establishing a time-share program for the computer. Things turned ugly enough when I established the “If you’re old enough to shave, you’re too old for Trick-or-Treating” rule. I don’t know if I can stand having a house full of young men who think Peace on Earth means ridding the world of the undead.

Hopefully if I'm good, Santa will spirit me away to the Island of Misfit Toys. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long winter.

Desperately Seeking Something

Because I don’t spend enough time looking for things in my daily life, I bought a word search puzzle book. The idea is to find and circle words that are hidden inside a box with a bunch of unalphabetized letters, which is good because finding the other kind would be too much like filing. Word Search is like a scavenger hunt only you don’t have to go next door to your spooky neighbor’s house asking for a kitchen knife or a set of hot curlers.

My first search was for a pencil. Ever the optimist, I looked in the cup on my desk. I found four broken blue crayons, two fountain pens with no ink, and a petrified Milkbone. I briefly thought about trying to use the Milkbone, but the Dachshund is possessive and I’m pretty sure she can take me in a fight. She is not known for fair play.

I looked under the sofa cushions, in the glove compartment of the car, and in my jewelry box, where I found the safety pin I needed last week for an unbecoming wardrobe malfunction. Later that afternoon while doing the laundry, I found a pencil stub in the lint trap of the dryer. The eraser was melted, but if we wait for all our blessings to come at once there will be nothing left for the Rapture, so I forged ahead.

I sat down with my puzzle book and my pencil stub. Immediately I found several words. None of them were in the word list and I’m not sure that all of them were English. At least one of them made the dog blush. Perhaps I needed an eraser after all. I scratched out my ineligible answers with the safety pin and circled a likely looking word using all the letters on one side of the puzzle. If this were Scrabble, I could clinch the victory with a Q and an unabridged dictionary.

About that time the Dachshund tackled me in an announced Milkbone raid and broke the point of my pencil stub. So now I’m off to search for the pencil sharpener. But that’s okay. I haven’t found any more words to circle anyway. I think I’ll write to Vanna and ask to buy a vowel.

Wonder where I can find her address?

Grasping for Gusto

The day I turned 40 I put on yesterday's socks. I poured YooHoo on my cornflakes instead of milk, ate brown sugar out of the box, and thawed the meat for dinner on the counter. Just call me Wild Thing.

“What’s got into you?” asked Raelynn, shaking off her umbrella as she stepped into the kitchen. Raelynn was born with a manicure and a perm. She's never experienced the aggravation of a hangnail or the embarrassment of unruly frizz.

“I’ve decided to revel in life. I’m not getting any younger. I’m going to do all the things I never let myself do before. Is it raining? Watch this.” I skipped out the back door and frolicked in the raindrops, kicking and splashing through baby puddles in the driveway.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Raelynn said as held the door open for me.

“Why not?”

Suddenly I slipped in the mud and landed right on my bottom step with a hearty thud.

"Life might begin at 40," she laughed and helped me up. "But good insurance is forever."

The Seventh Level of Thanksgiving

For sheer heat index, Hell’s Kitchen is nothing compared to my kitchen. Of course, a straight comparison is really not fair because I have a secret weapon.

The Inferno.

The Inferno, a malicious representative of an extra level of the Bad Place that was too frightening for Dante to include in his detailed description of the place where murderers and people who leave the copier jammed go to spend eternity, looks relatively innocent poised there beside the refrigerator waiting for me to thrust the next victim into its cavernous maw. Soot from past victims cover the oven door like oatmeal around a baby’s mouth.

The trouble comes from a malfunctioning thermostat deep inside the Inferno. It’s either broken or has learned human characteristics like the freaky computers that take over the world in stories that I used to think were fiction.

Me: I’d like to preheat to 350.
Oven: I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Amy.

I only use one rack at the very top. Anything lower would just be cruel. When I first got the thing, I foolishly and against orders turned the knob to Preheat and sacrificed a pan of brown and serve rolls. The dogs wouldn’t eat them, even the Lab that once tried to consume three hubcaps and a tire tool in the garage. Finally I threw them in the yard and claimed a meteor hit the elm tree.

As you can imagine, cooking a nice Thanksgiving dinner is out of the question. Oh, ever the optimist, I tried it once. The Inferno gutted that bird like a freshly caught catfish and raced across my innocent roasting pan like the great Chicago fire. There are fossils embedded in the enamel that will amaze archaeologists in centuries to come.

As I whipped open the oven door in a suicidal attempt to rescue the dinner, the heat sent my hair flying toward the ceiling like space dust and singed my eyebrows. Armed with Kevlar potholders, I whipped the pan out of the oven and hurled it toward the table. The remains of the charred cooking bag stuck to the turkey’s skin like a huge black bandaid and the legs looked like Tiki torches. The bones at the end of the drumsticks crumbled to ash upon contact with fresh air.

Bill Dear, ever the man with the right thing to say when kitchen disasters strike, strolled into the room coughing and clutching a cup of coffee like it was the last life boat on the Titanic. “I didn’t even know you could make blackened turkey.”

I peered at him through the smoke. “It was only in there for half an hour.”

“At least you had the foresight to put it in a body bag before you cooked it.”

I gazed forlornly at the little ashen piles of soot under the drumsticks and thought about the Thanksgiving dinner we would eat at McDonald’s.

“Don’t worry, Baby,” Bill drew a gentle hand across my face where my eyebrows used to be. “Anybody can cook a turkey breast, but it takes somebody special to mulch the feet.”