happy appendicitiversary

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A year ago yesterday, I was sitting in the ER waiting on a CT scan to see what might be wrong with my guts. I hadn’t felt great the night before but had blamed it on some really greasy pizza I’d eaten. My main symptoms were bloating (omg, so much bloating) and discomfort in my lower right quadrant, but nothing so bad that it made me feel like it was any kind of emergency. I had taken some Gas-X and walked about 50 laps around the house to try and get the bloat to shift, took some tylenol for the gut pain, and had given up and gone to bed. I was uncomfortable all night, especially since I normally slept on my right side.

I should note here that appendicitis was always one of my greatest fears. It’s such a common thing that can go Big Wrong so quickly, and cause so much pain, and you hardly ever hear anyone telling stories about how their appendicitis was no big deal, you know? I think years and years of hearing all those stories just compounded with my already rampant control issues centered especially around my health (or lack there-of), and boom: appendicitis became my own personal medical boogey-man. So that night and early the next day, I was doing all sorts of mental gymnastics to try and avoid the reality that what was happening was probably appendicitis and I was probably headed for emergency surgery.

After a whole day sitting around waiting on tests, a nice doctor came in and confirmed that it was in fact my appendix causing the issues. They gave me the option of going home with a whole heap of antibiotics to see if that would calm things down, but at that point it sort of just felt like kicking the can down the road, you know? Like, even if the antibiotics had worked, who’s to say that the appendix wouldn’t eventually get inflamed again, possibly even worse? As it was, I was super lucky because my appendicitis really WASN’T that big of a deal, comparatively. I never got sick, I never had a fever, and while I had some pain, it was certainly nowhere near the worst thing I’d ever felt. So, rather than put off surgery and then always be wondering even more than I already did whether or not every pang and pain in my lower right quadrant was my appendix fixing to try and kill me, I said we might as well just take it out. 

I waited for the doctor to leave and then I had a pretty thorough breakdown while my sweet husband tried to comfort me. I’d had abdominal surgery before (to remove a similarly cranky gallbladder many years ago) and even with the magic of laparoscopic technology, it’s not a super fun ride. Plus, I think anesthesia freaks out even those of us without major control issues. And those of us WITH control issues? Well. The idea of someone forcibly putting you to sleep with no guarantee that you’ll wake up is pretty fucking dicey to say the least. 

Realizing that I was probably going to be waiting around a good long while for surgery, and knowing that Mark would eventually have to leave to go home and feed the dog and himself, I finally wised up and asked the nurse for something to help with the anxiety. I can’t remember the name of the stuff she gave me but it was definitely helpful. I went from like an 8.5 on my personal panic scale to about a 3. Which, given that my baseline is what most normal people would probably consider like a 4, that wasn’t too shabby. 

Mark did end up having to leave, I think around 8:30 or 9pm. They eventually got rolling on surgery prep after 10pm, and I apparently spent a couple extra hours in recovery because they didn’t have a room to put me in for a while afterward. When I woke up in the morning, I realized that the room I was in looked SUPER familiar but I couldn’t figure out why for a few minutes, then it dawned on me: it was a room in the cardiac care unit that my mom had spent quite a lot of time in a few years before when she’d had some heart problems. Like, the exact room, the same side of the room, even. Waking up there and realizing that, before anyone explained the room shortages, was pretty nerve-wracking. I kept feeling around my chest to make sure I didn’t have all the actual cardiac monitors on me, and there was no small amount of concern that perhaps my own heart issues had cropped up while I was under anesthesia. I must have looked kind of deer-in-the-headlights when the nurse finally came in, because her eyebrows shot up and she immediately asked if I was ok. I asked why I was in the CCU and she said, “oh yeah, sorry about that! We got you because they had nowhere to put you after recovery last night. That’s the only reason, I promise.” So that was quite a relief. 

I was sore but didn’t feel super bad after surgery, which had also been my experience after my gallbladder eviction. And, as with the gallbladder surgery, things took a real nosedive once I got home and the good drugs wore off. I was pretty miserable for about a week, and I kept crying to Mark about how the recovery pain was so much worse than the actual sickness had been and why didn’t I just take the antibiotics instead, etc. Core strength and mobility are so easy to take for granted. You don’t realize just how much you rely on specific muscles to do, well, everything, until those muscles are no longer available to use or really hurt when you use them. Also, I’m one of those people who doesn’t get physically sick from anesthesia but it does a fucking number on me mentally. Like, super big sads and hopelessness. Being unable to move easily and having your brain trying to eat you at the same time is not a good combo. Zero stars, do not recommend. But, as is usually the case, I got better bit by bit, day by day, and a month later we managed to go on a trip we had planned to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard (Mark won the trip through his work. Trust me, those are not places we would be able to afford to vacation in otherwise) with a minimum of woe on my part. 

Today all I have to show for the whole thing are three tiny scars, each less than half an inch long, on my lower belly. One is actually right in my belly button and is hard to even see unless you know where to look. And while, like I said, I’d give the whole experience a zero out of 10 on the fun scale, at least I no longer have to worry about every pang in my lower right abdomen being my appendix anymore! 

A piece of ginger root in a jar was the closest thing I could find in my house to non-grossly represent a human appendix. I didn’t get to see mine so I don’t really know what it actually looked like, but I’m going to assume this rendering is way, way off base. Please don’t email or DM me images of actual human appendices, infected or otherwise. Neither of us needs that.

things I re-learn every time my husband goes away

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An incomplete list, in no specific order.

1. The correct order in which the Morning Things and Bedtime Things must be done in order to satisfy the dog. Mark usually handles the Keppo stuff when we first get up and when we’re getting ready for bed. There’s a certain order to these routines and Keppo knows it. If I make the mistake of trying to make myself a cup of tea before we go out for walkies, for instance, I’ll hear about it. And gods forbid I take too long in the bathroom before bed, because the whole valley will hear about it. Keppo should just about have me re-trained by the time Mark gets back to resume these duties.

2. It doesn’t matter that I’m off work and don’t have to wake up early, don’t eat chocolate or sugary ice cream in the evening. Just because I don’t HAVE to get up early doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to get myself jacked on sugar or chocolate and then be unable to sleep for half the night. Also, my body is programmed to wake up at 6:30am regardless of whether I’ve fallen asleep at 10pm or 2:30am. Fighting it does no good. Going back to bed after waking up at 6:30 does no good.

3. If I buy a box of cereal and a carton of milk, that’s 3 meals a day for 3 days, at least, that I don’t need to cook. And if I get the puffed oatmeal squares that have a bunch of fiber in them, I don’t even need to worry about not eating vegetables! I’m not proud of that, but I’m nothing if not pragmatic.

4. The dehumidifier tank is heavier than I give it credit for when it’s full.

4a. I am perfectly capable of schlepping said heavy dehumidifier tank up the basement stairs to empty it. Is it fun? No. But I can do it.

5. It’s nice to have extra room in the bed, but it’s nicer to have company. Specific company, I should say. As in, my husband. I’m not interested in fighting just anyone for the blankets, thank you.

6. I will get bored after two days off by myself, and rather than converting that boredom into useful activities like cleaning the house, I will instead become a toad who only wants to read books, play video games, and eat cereal (and chocolate). All the to-do lists in the world can’t help me after day 2 home alone. If I’m not getting everything crossed off that list by sundown on day 2, it’s likely not getting done any time soon because I’ll be way too busy in Mediocre Supernatural Fantasy Romance Novel Land or Shoot Colorful Bubbles To Help A Cat Get To Space Land. I might switch it up a little and sit at my desk to try and struggle-bus through writing a blog post (ahem), but that’s about it.

7. I am braver when he’s here. I’m also funnier, smarter, less prone to bouts of extreme weirdness, and more responsible. I spent a large portion of the first half of my life alone. Not just unpartnered, but pretty literally alone. I don’t want to make this sound like I shouldn’t or can’t be alone, or that I think there’s anything wrong with being a solitary person, because that’s not it at all. I was often a very functional  person whilst living alone, and there are still plenty of times when I really enjoy my own company. It’s just that I got quite used to existing mostly just inside my own head, and even after almost 14 years of cohabitation with another actual human being, it’s still SUPER easy for me to slip right back into that space, that rut of believing that I’m basically a ghost just flitting through everyone else’s lives instead of a tangible human being living my own tangible life. Mark grounds me. He’s the weight at the end of my balloon string that keeps me from floating off into the atmosphere, eventually landing in the ocean, and choking some poor unsuspecting turtle. Or something.

This is what I wake up to most mornings when Mark is away. I like to anthropomorphize and say that he’s laying in Mark’s spot to keep me company, but in reality I know that he’s probably been hotboxed out from under the covers by my constant flatulence because I’ve been living on Oatmeal Squares for the past three days.

lemon aid

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Life with ADHD provides endless opportunities for self-inquiry and self-discovery. Every day I find new things that make me wonder about myself and how my brain works. For example:

What is this semi-desiccated half of a lemon doing on my kitchen counter at 11 in the morning, when the last time I used lemon for anything was while making salad dressing at dinner last night? Nothing else from the dinner-making process is still on the counter. Why did this half of a lemon, in particular, get left out? It’s not even the squeezed half. I could have put this in a container, stashed it in the fridge, and gotten another salad’s worth of dressing out of it. If there were any part of this lemon that it might make SENSE to have left on the counter, surely it would be the squeezed half. But, no. I wasted a perfectly good half of a lemon by inexplicably deciding to not put it away last night.

The really funny part is, I made breakfast this morning right next to this lemon half. I made my husband’s lunch right next to the lemon half. I stood at the counter taking my vitamins and the lemon half didn’t register. I went back to the counter an hour later to make a cup of coffee, which involves standing around waiting for the kettle to boil, which is certifiably the most boring thing ever and I had plenty of time to become aware of my surroundings in that two minutes that I stared off into space probably thinking about bears doing an interpretive dance to Billie Eilish’s song, ‘Bad Guy’, or some shit…and I DID NOT NOTICE THAT LEMON. The lemon did not reenter my realm of consciousness until just now when I went to the kitchen again for a handful of crackers. And why did getting some crackers trigger the realization that the lemon existed, you might ask? Good question! I have no fucking idea. The crackers were nowhere near the lemon. I could have just as easily gotten a handful of crackers and wandered right back to my desk again without ever clocking the lemon. But for some reason, some scientific mystery that will forever be unsolved because who the fuck would ever want to look that deeply into the percolating pile of rot that is my brain, 11:00 AM was apparently Counter Lemons Exist Again time.

Oh my god.

What if we really ARE all just brains in jars lined up on a shelf somewhere, and whatever entity that’s keeping the collection decided that my brain-in-a-jar needed some freshening up so it dropped a lemon into the jar? Maybe the lemon is meant to be enrichment for my enclosure. Maybe it’s an experiment to see if something as benign as half a random lemon could make a brain short-circuit and self-destruct.

I need to make some calls…

…OR DO I?

white noise

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I am the type of person who can’t sleep without some kind of white noise. I mean, half the time I can’t sleep anyway because my brain is a dick, but still. With the white noise, sleep may happen. Without the white noise, sleep will definitely NOT happen.

The source of the white noise isn’t super important. A fan blowing, the A/C unit running, even a white noise track playing over headphones will usually work if I’m travelling.

In our bedroom, we have one of those round twist-top white noise machines like what you often see used for noise cancellation in doctor’s offices. We’ve had it for many years. It has two speeds (white and…whiter, I guess?) and you can twist the top to change the size of the openings the air comes out of, thus changing the tone slightly (regular white, off-white, ecru…ok, the joke wasn’t great to begin with and I’ve now officially ruined it). I am so in the habit of turning the white noise machine on at bedtime that I still turn it on even when we run the A/C at night. I literally cannot hear the white noise machine over the A/C, but turning it on is muscle memory at this point.

Taking that into account, you can then imagine that when I woke up yesterday morning after the A/C shut off and there was no white noise machine going, I noticed immediately. I figured I must have just been out of it when I went to bed the night before and somehow forgot to turn on the white noise even though, like I said, it’s muscle memory at this point. Last night when I went to bed, I was very deliberate in my turning on of the white noise machine and my acknowledgement that it was, in fact, ON. I turned it on before the A/C, even. I KNOW that sucker was on when I got into bed.

So, why was it not running again this morning when I woke up? Did my husband shut it off, maybe?

Me: “Hey, did you shut the white noise machine off in the night last night?”

Him: “Nope. I noticed it wasn’t on this morning, too. I figured you just didn’t turn it on last night.”

Me: “No, I definitely turned it on. I made extra sure I did, because it was off when I woke up yesterday morning too, and I figured I must have just forgotten it the night before.”

Him: “Hunh. Weird.”

And for him that was the end of it, because he is not insane. My brain, on the other hand, immediately took the How Did The White Noise Machine Shut Off By Itself torch and RAN with it. My first three thoughts were exactly as follows:

1. Maybe someone has crept ultra-silently into our bedroom the last two nights and shut the white noise machine off while we sleep. Nevermind that I have the world’s most attentive watch-dog, who can hear mice farting in walls three houses away, who can smell traces of the last podokesaurus who stomped through proto-New-England 145 million years ago, and whose most favorite thing ON THIS VAST GREEN EARTH is to bark, specifically at strangers.

2. Maybe a mouse was on the desk that the white noise machine sits on, and maybe they walked by and brushed against the power switch, thus shutting the machine off. We’ve never had mice inside this house. Also, see above references to dog who hears / smells everything ever and would raise the unholiest of rackets immediately if a rodent was present. He wouldn’t chase and kill the rodent because he’s not useful a savage, mind you. But he’d sure as shit let us know it was there in no uncertain terms.

3. Maybe one of the rather large wolf spiders recently spotted in our basement (OH GODS WHY) came up the stairs (ACK), got into our room (PANIC-FLAIL), and hit the button with one of its extra long, extra hairy, EXTRA FUCKING CREEPY AND WRONG spider legs. I am convinced that at this point, my brain was just taking the piss, just trying to see if it could send me into an actual nervous breakdown, because I am super, SUPER anti-spider. I mean, in the house, anyway. Outside? Fine. Spider on with your bad self. Build all the webs, eat all the bugs. And honestly, small spiders in the house aren’t generally a problem either as long as they don’t do dumb shit like TOUCH ME. Big spiders in the house, though? No. Big spiders in the house make me want to move out…preferably without packing a damned thing, because fuck only knows where those hairy bastards are hiding at this point and OMG WHY AM I STILL THINKING ABOUT THIS, UGH.

Basically, my brain now won’t stop coming up with increasingly disturbing and/or convoluted ways in which the white noise machine may have gotten shut off in the night. At one point I was even wondering if maybe I had started sleep-walking and had shut it off then. Our bedroom is kind of cramped though, and I am large and klutzy, so I feel like even if I WAS sleepwalking, I wouldn’t have made it as far as the white noise machine without tripping over something and waking myself up, or bashing into something and doing myself noticable harm. But as far as I know I’ve never sleep-walked, so maybe that’s not how that works.

So, I guess there’s only one thing for it: we have to set up a night-vision camera pointed at the white noise machine and see what’s going on. Except I can’t do that either because I’ve watched one too many episodes of Ghost Hunters (read: I’ve watched exactly one episode. Not even a whole episode. I watched like ten minutes of it once, eight years ago), and I know that all the poltergeists show up as weird flashes and blobs on night vision in the middle of the night while you’re asleep. IT’S SCIENCE, BRENDA. You can’t argue with science.

And I’ll tell you what: finding out that there are poltergeists flitting around my bedroom all damned night isn’t going to help my sleep issues AT ALL.

“Hello, PETA? Yes, this is Keppo. Again, yes. Could you please send Sarah McLachlan to come pick me up? My human has finally lost it for real. Also, they haven’t fed me in weeks. MONTHS, even. Maybe years. I’m a dog, time works differently for me. But seriously, could you…hello? HELLO? Man, maybe the poltergeists got into the phone, too.”

undeveloped

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I found an undeveloped roll of film the other day. It was in a bag of random stuff that has gone through at least three house moves with me. I’m pretty sure I haven’t used my non-digital camera in close to 20 years, so this sucker has been around a while.

Exhibit A: ancient technology unearthed from the depths of a bag of junk.

There’s a place in town that still processes film and prints pictures, so I’m going to drop this off to be developed soon. I fully realize that it’s so old and has been stored so disrespectfully (for real: it has been banging around kitchen junk drawers for many years), that it likely won’t even turn out. But I’m curious enough about what’s on it to want to spend the money anyway, just on the off chance.

I used to take tons of pictures, often with the aim of wanting to be artsy, but I wasn’t very good at it. So, more than likely, this is a whole roll of pictures of branches or a cornfield or something similar. There is one other possibility: I took a trip to Kentucky to spend time with a boy circa 2000-ish (don’t quote me on that date, I’d have to get the scrap book out to confirm). I shot two rolls of film while I was there, but only one ever got developed. This may very well be that second roll of film. That was a weird trip and quite frankly, a weird time in my life in general (although, when is life NOT weird, honestly), and I have mixed feelings about the possibility of having that little time capsule available to examine. The boy doesn’t matter—he’s long gone and there were no deep feels there anyway. But I’m equal parts nervous and intrigued at the prospect of perhaps getting to see a glimpse of myself, or at the very least, of my perspective, from so long ago. Aging is such a mindfuck in that, the older you get, the more sure you become of yourself in some regards, but the more you (or a lot of us, anyway), tend to understand that the only constant is change. We are somehow always the same person we’ve always been in a general sense, but there will have been tens or even hundreds of versions of us from year to year, day to day, sometimes even minute to minute. And that’s fine—that’s completely natural. But it can feel very odd, especially if you’re an overly sensitive, always-in-your head person like me.

Anyway. If the pictures come out, I’ll post some of them. If nothing else, they should be good for a laugh at my complete lack of photography skills.

fiction: trash bird

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The following is a little piece of fiction I wrote for the college comp class I’m taking this semester. Cora is a character I’ve been noodling on for a year or so now, but I hadn’t actually written anything down prior to this. The story I want to tell with her is quite different than this, but I liked how this came out and wanted to share. I may post more bits of fiction in future, depending on whether I can actually get it out of my head.

Feedback is welcomed as long as you keep it kind and constructive.

*******

Trash Bird

Air burned in my lungs as the tops of the trees whipped by underneath me.

“I’m going to peck your eyes out, you little shit!” the hawk screeched from behind.

I certainly believed her. She was closing in fast—evasive maneuvers were going to be necessary. I scanned the treetops up ahead and noticed a small clearing. If I could drop down into that space and then get up into the thick cover of a maple or an oak, I might be able to lose her.

“Only if you can catch me, beady eyes!” I cawed back, unable to help myself. She had started it, after all. I had been sitting on the edge of that dumpster, minding my own business with a discarded slice of pizza, when Ms. Cranky Pants had swooped down and tried to grab me for a snack of her own. Rather than running away at once, I had put up a bit of a fight, landing several good hard pecks and relieving the hawk of two quill feathers before my apparently stunted sense of self-preservation finally kicked in.

“The taste of your fear will only make you that much more delicious when I get my claws on you,” I heard her say. Most hawks were relatively reasonable but this one seemed to have…issues.

Just there, the edge of the clearing. I pulled my wings in a bit and dove for it. Down into the trees I rocketed, barely keeping control. Branches—I needed to get up into some big leafy branches before she had a chance to drop down and get me back in her sights.

I banked left, then right, then another hard right toward a huge oak tree with dense foliage. Snapping my wings out as wide as I could brought me to an abrupt halt on a branch about midway up the tree. Chest heaving, I twisted my head sideways to get a better look above me and saw that the hawk was just starting her dive into the clearing. Time to find a place to hide or I was going to be attending a very involuntary lunch date.

Three quick hops had me up close to the trunk of the tree. The hawk’s eyesight was far too good for me to get away with just huddling against the trunk, though. Looking up the trunk, I noticed a small cavity a couple feet above my head. The idea of stuffing myself into random tree cavities without at least doing some reconnaissance first didn’t exactly fill me with confidence, but whatever might be in there probably wasn’t as bad as getting ripped apart by an angry hawk. Probably. I looked out into the clearing again to see said angry hawk swooping in along, slow circle around the perimeter—clearly looking for me. Random tree cavity it was, then!

I hopped and flapped my way up to the hole and gripped the edge, peering into the dark. No movement, no strong smell—just some stale rodent scent from seasons past. I could hear the hawk’s wingbeats nearing now. There was no more time to weigh options.

“I know you’re in here somewhere, trash-bird. It’s only a matter of time until I get my eyes on you and then you’re done for,” she called.

“Just because I EAT trash doesn’t mean I AM trash,” I muttered under my breath as I stuffed myself tail-first into the cavity. Several somethings crunched underfoot as I pushed back further into the dark, but I couldn’t think about that.

The wingbeats were getting steadily louder. I watched as the hawk banked, slowing to scan the trees around the edge of the clearing more closely. As she swooped past my tree her golden eyes swept right over the cavity without a hint of recognition. I realized I was holding my breath. I watched her make another unhurried circuit of the clearing. Then, unbelievably, she started beating her wings harder, caught an updraft, and started to soar up away toward the clouds.

“Don’t mistake this for mercy,” her screech echoed back to me, distorted by the wind. “You can’t hide forever, and I have a very long memory.”

I waited until she was fully out of sight before letting out my breath in a whoosh so mighty that my beak whistled with the force of it. I did a full body shake and feather-ruffle, trying to exorcise some of the adrenaline coursing through my veins. I wasn’t about to jump straight back into the sky and stick my head above the treetops yet, that was for sure. But the memory of those crunching noises beneath my feet earlier was starting to solidify in my consciousness and I didn’t feel like hanging around to find out what that had been all about.

As I was pulling myself out of the cavity, a soft, sibilant voice slithered up from near my feet:

“Going so sssoon? I thought perhapsss…you might sssstay for a… chat.”

I glanced down to see a brown tree snake at least twice the length of me unfurling slowly into the light. Its eyes glittered with menace as it flicked its forked tongue toward me, practically tasting me through the air. Squawking in dismay, I dove off the edge of the cavity and flapped for all I was worth.

“Not today, sorry! Places to go, trash to eat, you know how it is. Thanks for the hiding place, though. Good luck, uhhh… snaking!” I cawed back over my shoulder.

Puffy white clouds scuttled by overhead as I caught a breeze and rode it across the clearing in the opposite direction the hawk had headed. I took a few moments to enjoy the warmth of the sun on my back and the general niceness of having lived to fly another day. I then

found my thoughts wandering back to that discarded slice of pizza I had been working on before I was so rudely interrupted earlier. Before I knew it, I was banking left out of the clearing, headed back toward town.

turkey tracking

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Tell me you live in a very small town without TELLING me you live in a very small town. I’ll go first:

This morning on my town’s community Facebook group, there was a post about a “rogue turkey” hanging around someone’s yard. There were a couple of comments asking if the original poster could get a picture so that people could try to ID said turkey, but the original poster couldn’t provide a photo.

“It’s just a huge white turkey”, they said. “There are no markings, it’s white all over from what I can see.”

A little while later someone commented saying they thought they knew where the turkey belonged and posted the address. This was followed by debate over whether that was actually possible, as surely a domestic turkey wouldn’t be willing to travel so far afield, especially with so much snow on the ground. A series of photos and comments then followed which tracked the straying poultry’s progress across yards and pastures all along one end of town.

Someone finally got in touch with the bird’s owner, who joined the Facebook group so that they could arrange a pick-up. There were a bunch of comments expressing relief that the turkey was finally going to get back to his rightful home.

But then, drama! The owner arrived at the last known location of the turkey and it wasn’t actually there anymore.

“I’m here and I can’t see him”, they wrote. “If anyone has eyes on him, please let me know ASAP”.

A photo with a reply that read as quite exasperated in tone popped up moments later:

“He’s in my yard again, trying to get in with my chickens. PLEASE COME GET YOUR BIRD.”

A little while later the owner was back on the thread posting again about how they were at the spot and the turkey wasn’t around.

This started SEVEN HOURS AGO. I just checked the thread again and as of six minutes ago, the turkey still hasn’t been apprehended. It apparently keeps circling this one woman’s property and she (of the COME GET YOUR BIRD comment from mid-day, among others), is getting prettyyyy saltyyyy about it.

The incident has spawned several other spinoff threads with pictures of the wandering turkey, as well. Multiple people have asked for his name. There might be an “I Saw The Stray Turkey” Tshirt in the works. I made that last one up but I would sure as shit buy one if it were true, because this has easily been the most entertaining local social media thread I’ve seen in years.

Look at that magnificent bastard. Free as the day he was hatched. May the road rise to meet you, sir.
PS: this is not my photo, I jacked it from one of the spinoff threads. I live on the other end of town so alas I did NOT get to see the stray turkey.

adventures in ADHD baking, chapter 716: muffin problems

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I’ve had it in my head for at least a week now that I wanted to make some muffins. Specific muffins: they’re pumpkin muffins with spices and nuts and dried cranberries and maple syrup in them and they’re delicious. They’re the kind of thing that I’ve made so many times that I eventually got sick of having to bring the recipe up on my phone and almost dropping my phone in the bowl of muffin batter while trying to read and measure at the same time, so I scribbled the recipe down on a scrap of paper and now it lives on the side of my fridge.

This morning was perhaps not the best morning to embark on my muffin-baking fantasy, in retrospect. Last night was rough. I was up and down several times in the night, as was my husband, with our various respective bathroom-related issues. My FitBit practically asked me if I was OK this morning when I brought up my sleep data…or lack there-of. Suffice to say, I have not been firing on all cylinders today.

But those muffins. Those sweet, sweet pumpkin nuggets of joy with the walnuts and the cranberries. I had been thinking about them for days. I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. Because if there’s one thing I DEFINITELY want to do when I’m tragically overtired, it’s eat baked goods. I mean, I want to eat baked goods 24/7, basically, let’s be honest. But my decision-making barometer goes especially askew when there’s a lack of sleep and sugar involved.

Once I saw my husband off to work and got the dishwasher going, I had roughly 35 minutes to get the muffins going before I had to log into work and start pretending to give a shit about non-muffin subjects. No problem, plenty of time. I measured my drys in one bowl, my wets in the other, then I combined the two. Mix mix mix, taste to make sure it wasn’t poison, and bingo! Ready to bake! I got out my trusty scoop and started portioning muffin batter into the wells of the pan. Everything was going splendidly…

…until I got to the end of the batter after 11 muffins rather than 12.

Hmmm, I thought. That’s not right. This recipe definitely makes 12 muffins. It always has! And I didn’t even do extra rigorous poison-tests this time like I tend to do with cookie dough, so it’s not even like I could blame myself for having eaten too much of the uncooked batter (yes, I know, raw flour and raw egg, clearly I don’t value my life. If I get salmonella I won’t come crying to you, I promise). I stood there looking back and forth between the scraped-clean bowl and the empty muffin cup for what probably would have felt like an embarassingly long time had I been operating on enough sleep to feel shame. Or anything other than muffin-lust.

I grabbed the recipe and started going down the list, mentally checking things off:

Pumpkin? Yes.

Brown sugar? Yes.

Oatmeal? Yes.

Maple syrup? Two eggs? Flour? Baking soda? Salt? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

100 grams of oil.

Uhhh…

100 grams…of…oil.

I looked at the measuring cup I had been using. Dry as a bone. Definitely hadn’t held oil since the last time it was washed.

Well, balls. That was a no on the oil, then.

I looked at the portioned-out batter again. It looked fine. It had definitely seemed slightly thicker than usual even before I realized I was a muffin-cup short, but it certainly wasn’t thick enough to make me think something was very out of whack. LIKE THAT I HAD FORGOTTEN THE OIL, FOR INSTANCE. I poked at it. I tested for poison again. It was a good batch. The spices were really nice, it wasn’t overly sweet. I REALLY wanted these muffins to happen. And I REALLY didn’t want to try to scoop batter out of 11 portioned out muffin cups so that I could mix oil in and then portion them all out again.

I checked the time. 8:55. I needed to punch in by 9. With a lack of time as my final justification for not fixing my mistake, I muttered a resigned “YOLO, I guess” and slid the pan into the waiting oven.

20 minutes later I came back to survey the damage. The muffins certainly smelled nice and they didn’t look too shabby either, aside from not having puffed up much. I tested them with a toothpick and they seemed done so I pulled them out to cool a bit while I made a cup of coffee.

Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and I tore into one. The muffin wrapper was…reluctant to come off. That’s putting it nicely. Probably close to a third of the muffin hung on to the paper like cement. The part that did come off was basically fine, though. The texture was a little weird but the flavors were good and the muffins were certainly edible. I stood there picking stuck crumbs off the muffin paper like some kind of kitchen gargoyle after I finished the main event, so that should be a testament to the flavor. Or at least my level of commitment to muffin consumption. And possibly my addiction to carbs in general.

So, in summation, I would offer you these points:

– you can totally bake muffins without oil in them. Would I recommend it? No. But will they be at least vaguely edible if you skip the oil? Probably.

– maybe double-check your ingredient list BEFORE you portion out your muffin batter, if you don’t want to live life on the bleeding edge of culinary experimentation like some of us.

– weird muffins are better than no muffins. I think this is probably a good metaphor for some kind of deep life observation or something, but I’m too fucking tired to go there right now.

They could have been way worse.

buckets. plural.

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One thing nobody mentioned when I was talking to various people ahead of buying my first house a few years ago was buckets. Plural.

“Make sure you buy a step-ladder”, they said.

“You’re going to need a roof rake for the winter”, they said.

Extension cords, a shop-vac, those disposable drain-zippers that pull disgusting squirrel-sized clumps of hair out of your bathroom sink drains…all things that were suggested to flesh out the basic tool kit I had been maintaining for the nearly two decades since I had moved out of my parents’ house. And all of these things have come in very useful in the last almost three years, for sure.

But what happens when you have to open a drain pipe to replace a P-trap and the sink is full of gross water that hasn’t drained in days and is full of gods only know what? How do you store water for flushing the toilet during a big storm where the power will surely be going out? How do you tansport sand and salt for your inevitably icy driveway in the winter time?

Buckets. You need them.

And I…did not have any. We were making due with large mixing bowls, empty plastic totes left over from moving, reusing gallon water jugs…you get the picture. It’s not like we’re in a constant state of needing to contain fluids around here, by the way…but you know. Stuff happens. And it wasn’t that I was resistant to buckets or the buying there-of in any way. It was mostly just that buckets were never front of mind whenever we went to the hardware store, so they never ended up getting purchased.

Fast forward to last week. Back to back ice storms (thanks, climate change) turned our driveway into a slush-fest, which then froze over into an icy death trap. We had been storing some driveway sand in one of the aforementioned plastic totes, but those totes are big and sand is heavy. Plus we only have a small car, so while getting an empty tote into the trunk and out to the town sand pile is no big deal, removing said tote half-full of heavy, wet sand from the small car’s trunk upon returning home is a full-on struggle bus situation with much back-tweaking potential. Which is all a really long-winded way of saying that our driveway was icy as fuck, we needed some sand, and we had no reasonably good way of transporting said sand.

“Maybe we should get a bucket,” was my contribution to the sand-acquistion logistical discussion we had after using up the last of last year’s sand to try and get the car unstuck for the third time last week (which didn’t end up working, by the way).

Once we were able to get out of the driveway again, thanks to an entreprenuerial snowplow driver with a sander on his truck, we made our way to the local hardware store in search of a bucket.

Turns out the store had more sizes and types of buckets than we were expecting (which was one. I was expecting 5-gallon buckets and nothing else, given that this is not a big box store. Shows how much I know), so we ended up getting buckets…plural. We got two 5-gallon buckets and a 1-gallon bucket, the idea being that the big buckets were for sand transport and the little one was for sand dispersal. We went and got sand the next day, made the driveway much less treacherous, and felt pretty accomplished afterward.

And middle-aged. Because what screams “middle aged home owner” more than purchasing multiple buckets for the conveyance of driveway sand? Not much, for me. I’ve bought cars, furniture, appliances, insurance, even this actual house…and none of that made me feel quite as adulty as spending a Saturday morning buying buckets.

Plural.

box of hair

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We have a squirrel problem.

Thankfully it’s still a lower-case problem and not a PROBLEM…but still.

And yes, I know, I’m the person who is obsessed with chipmunks, and goes to outlandish lengths to befriend them. Chipmunks are not squirrels. Chipmunks hibernate in the winter. They’re tiny and cute and the holes they dig in my lawn are very small. They don’t inhale entire pounds of sunflower seeds on a daily basis. And, key point to this particular story: they don’t launch themselves bodily up the side of my house, trying to gain purchase on the siding so they can claw their way up to the bird feeder that is attached to my office window. 

Did you know that a chunky grey squirrel traveling at a high velocity can hit a wall hard enough to knock things off the interior windowsill of the affected wall? It’s true. I’ve seen it with my own eyes multiple times the past few weeks. 

The squirrels are also stressing Keppo the fuck out. Between the thumping on the wall, the scratching noises of them trying to climb the siding, and the chittering tirades when the red squirrels show up to invade what is apparently historically grey squirrel territory, there has been SO much barking. Patrols of the perimeter, which necessitate me being on the end of a leash because it’s not safe to let him out on his own, have also increased dramatically. Today we had to go out every 90 minutes all morning, for instance. I enjoy the walks but it’s really doing a number on what was my frankly already dismal rate of work productivity. 

All of this is what led up to me desperately Googling “how to repel squirrels” the other afternoon. The top three ideas that kept coming up were:

1. Spray predator urine in the area you want the squirrels to stay out of. If you’re a country person or grew up around hunters, you probably know that bottles of synthetic fox and coyote pee are readily available in most stores that sell hunting gear. Some hunters use it to mask the human scent on their clothes before going out into the woods. Initially this seemed like the best and most effective option for my squirrel issue but then I realized that:

  • we already have foxes and coyotes all over the place here and I really don’t want to pique their interest, thus bringing them closer to the house that my small defenseless dog lives in, 
  • the main spot that the squirrels hang out is under the bird feeder attached to my office window so that means I’d be spraying a canine-piss-scented substance directly under a window that I open multiple times a day, and 
  • the smell would probably drive Keppo almost as bonkers as the actual squirrels have been doing. 

2. Put up an owl decoy. This appealed to me simply because I like owls. I also got very excited at the prospect of neighboring owls possibly coming by to check out the decoy. Then I read that if you go the decoy route, you have to move it regularly because otherwise the squirrels will figure out its fake and then never respect the decoy OR you ever again. Which…that seems reasonable, honestly. What did NOT seem reasonable was the price of owl decoys though, so we were on to option number 3, which was…

3. Spread human and dog hair around the area you want to keep the squirrels out of. The idea is that they don’t like / are scared of the smells of humans and dogs so scattering hair around will keep them away. Since this was the cheapest, easiest, and most readily actionable of the top three ideas, I figured I’d give it a try. 

Mark brushed Keppo on Friday evening and collected all the hair in a little cardboard box. We put the box out in the mud room so that, should it get knocked over, it wouldn’t go all over the house. That turned out to be fairly smart because literally the next morning I was out in the mudroom putting a bag of trash out and what did I do? Knocked over the box of hair. Side note: this is how we learned that Keppo will attempt to eat clods of his own hair once they are detached from his body. My special, special boy. 

On Sunday morning I cut Mark’s hair and while that doesn’t result in a lot of clippings anymore (sorry dear), we figured what the heck, we’ll throw those in the Box of Hair as well. I also cleaned out a couple of my hair brushes, and I shed almost as badly as Keppo does, so by the time it was all said and done we had a pretty good stash going. 

This morning when I took Keppo out for our first patrol, I also took the Box of Hair. I carefully sprinkled it all around under the bird feeder and my office window. Keppo only tried to eat one chunk before he found some bird seed hulls that were even more illicit and therefore became his sole focus. We got everything set and then did our circuit of the house and returned back inside. Once back in my office, I opened the window a little bit and looked straight down just to make sure our placement was good. Perfect…a nice even coating of…hair. A hair barrier, if you will. A…hhhhhbarrier? Hair-ier? Wait no, that’s something different. But you get my drift. Pleased with my ingenuity, I sat down to get to work. 

All of ten minutes later I hear the characteristic scrabble-clunk-scrabblescrabble-crash of a fat-ass grey squirrel launching itself up the exterior wall. By the time I got up to go look out the window, a second had joined it. A red squirrel came barreling around the corner shortly thereafter. 

Not one of them gave a sweet blithering fuck about the hair barrier. They didn’t even slow down to sniff at it. I might as well have just scuffed my feet around the leaves a little as far as they were concerned. It was right back to business as usual for them and lack of ability to get any business done for me. 

So I guess it’s time to invest in an owl decoy and see how that goes. 

This is not a drive-through, sir.