Suite Life

My whole family is in Charlottesville for a wedding  this weekend. At the last minute, we decided to upgrade our room to a suite so that my cousin could stay with us and my mom. What a great idea! We've all been hanging out in the living room, and then we bought a couple bottles of wine and some fancy snacks. There's even a two-burner stove, and believe me, friends, if we were just staying one extra day, I'd be throwing a dinner party!

TAW

It's teacher appreciation week and this year my students have been very thoughtful. On Monday I got flowers and candy; yesterday one nice girl baked cookies, and today someone added to my flower arrangement, another presented me with a gift card, and then I got what will probably be a once-in-a-career gift. A cheese souffle.

Seriously.

Now that's appreciation.

Pizza Culpa

"Where's our pizza?" I growled over my stomach. "I'm starving!"

So hungry in fact was I that I picked up the phone without hesitation and dialed. (Those who know me will immediately recognize the significance of this gesture.) When a polite voice answered, I did my best to curb my crankiness. "I placed an online delivery order an hour and a half ago and I was just wondering where it was," I whined [slightly, very slightly].

She took my name. "We have that as an online pick-up order," she informed me sympathetically, and I realized with horror that the mistake was all mine. But before I could even let out the gigantic sigh that filled my lungs all the way down to my diaphragm she added, "Would you like us to remake it and deliver it as soon as possible?"

"That would be great," I whimpered [slightly, very slightly].

Please hurry up pizza.

Springcasm

With itchy eyes and scratchy throat, and amidst the prediction of billions of cicadas about to emerge and outnumber us humans 60 to 1, I swept another eight ounces of woven weeds and muck from the eaves of the porch this evening.

Ahhh, spring! What other joys might the season bring?

Darwin's Agent

There's a robin who has been trying to build a nest in the eaves of our porch for several weeks. We have a rule that once there are eggs in a nest, the bird family gets to stay until the babies fledge, but a bird's nest in that small space is a mess and a nuisance to everyone; I don't believe the birds really like having two humans, a dog, and a cat so near by. They just don't know it yet because the weather's been so yucky.

As such, we practice a form of avian contraception around here, knocking the sticks and grass down every day before anything gets established. Even so, this particular robin has shown considerable perseverance, returning day after day with blade after blade of dry grass. Until yesterday, I watched the mess she was making from the comfort of the living room, but early May is a good time to clean up the deck and start hardening off my seedlings, so I grabbed a pair of gloves, a broom, a roll of paper towels, and some 409 spray.

It was kind of gross out there; clumps of mud and strands of grass littered the area. The Adirondack chair in the corner looked as if had been shat upon by a billion birds, not just the one, and the cushion was a total loss-- first item into the garbage bag. Still I cleaned on, and it wasn't too long before the porch was a welcoming area of agriculture and relaxation.

This morning? That damn robin was back. I let the cat out there and chased her away personally several times, but I knew we would be knocking a nest down this evening.

When I got home tonight, though, I was unprepared however for the sheer amount of debris that was on that chair. It was covered in an entire range of miniature mountains of muck. Of one thing I was sure: no bird could possibly excrete so much in so little time. Had she have brought her whole freakin' flock for robin's revenge? Calling Alfred Hitchcock...

Turns out that when the soil is wet, as ours has been, female robins begin their nests. In addition to the obvious grass and twigs, beakful by beakful, they also carry approximately half a pound (half a pound!) of mud from the ground to the construction site. It takes your average robin hundreds of visits to build her nest, and we just happened to have one sloppy mud-bearer who dropped more on the chair than she placed in the eaves.

Of course all her hard work is gone now, swept away with the flick of a broom. I do feel a little bit guilty, but I comfort myself with the knowledge that, surely, natural selection is on my side.

And there it Is

We have a nice strawberry bed in our garden. When I first put the plants in two years ago, all the literature I read suggested not picking the fruit until the second year in order to help strengthen the plants and their subsequent crops.

I thought that was the dumbest idea ever, and I would have picked every single berry from those vines last year except that they all rotted on the ground side before they completely ripened. Having been forced into following the directions, my next dilemma was how to keep my berries from doing that every year.

The answer? Why, it's in the name. Straw. You're supposed to mulch the plants with straw, or even better, pine straw, and then the STRAWberries can ripen on a soft little bed. I did that today, and I have high hopes for lots of berries in June.

Be Still My Vintage Heart

I heard yesterday that starting next week and continuing into the next season, Patty Duke and Meredith Baxter are going to play a long-committed lesbian couple on Glee.

Let me animate my reaction to this news about a couple of my childhood icons:

spit take
slide whistle
jaw drops to the floor
boing boing sound
eyes pop out
goofy grin