Jeezah! WordPress took forever to open this morning because I’m using our old laptop. Somehow, ‘old’ in the world of laptops has become five years.
I wonder what life would be like if I began applying that five year mark of ‘old’ to other things?
Holy crap! That book was written over five years ago. No valuable information in there.
or
Wow! Even though she and I have been calling and sending email, I haven’t seen her in five years. No use carrying on with our friendship at this point.
or
My goodness! Our dog Scruffy is already five? Time for that ’special visit’ to the vet!
Ben and I got married over the weekend. The best moment was standing there with our shaman in our front yard and it being just the three of us and the folks standing there with us getting right with what we were doing there.
And then everyone and everything else simply disappeared and Ben and I got down with kissing a nice long kiss followed by a big bear hug and saying kind little things into one another’s ears just like we do almost every day in our front yard anyway. It was really, really great.
The next morning we went up the road to have breakfast with Ben’s dad, his girlfriend and a few other friends. Ben’s dad had all of these terrible bug bites on his legs and his girlfriend was taking this little anti-itch pen thingy and pressing it onto each individual bug bite.
A few moments later everyone was just sitting around talking and the following occurred:
-
I realized I was so tired that I couldn’t keep up with the conversation
-
So I picked up the anti-itch pen thingy and started trying to read the list of ingredients
-
But was apparently so tired that I couldn’t read either
-
So I decided to take the cap off and smell it
-
And it was akin to snapping open and sniffing a smelling salt and I almost fell out of my chair and onto the deck
-
So I was quite awake for about three minutes of the entire breakfast
And when I was awake for those three minutes the conversation went from…
- Birds to
- bird feeder placement in trees to
- being careful of poison ivy to
- someone saying that there is poison ivy growing at the top of the road where our mail boxes are, which
- got my attention because poison ivy causes me to look as if I am a cross between a human and a sheet of bubble wrap and
- become so miserable that I am unable to sleep and
- end up having thoughts that, should I openly share them, would have me placed into a straight jacket for life
After a three hour nap, Ben and I were talking about poison ivy again.
He said,
Maybe we should try to kill the poison ivy with vinegar
I said,
We know vinegar kills weeds. It’s worth a try.
He said,
Yep. Vinegar it is.
I said,
Maybe it will kill all of those frikkin’ Penny Power things they leave up there too.
And Ben laughed and gave me a look because he knows the Penny Power things that are left on the ground by our mail boxes at the top of the road drive me insane.
The Penny Power is a little newspaper where you can put an ad to sell things such as:
- Aunt Matilda’s old piano that your mom had delivered into your living room without your permission seven years ago because she was sick of it but thought it should stay in the family and chose you to tend to it
- That strange collection of old nuts and bolts that, during your bong hit days, seemed like it was going to be ‘worth a little something some day’
- An old lime green refrigerator that you’ve listed as being ‘in mint condition’ because your neighbor Fred was able to get it running for twenty minutes about two months ago.
None of the eight adults living on this road have ever asked for a Penny Power to be delivered. Yet, they are stacked and thrown and abandoned and left in droves on the ground beside our mail boxes at the top of the road where they gradually turn into a mass of mush that I feel quite certain is turning into some kind of biological experiment as we speak.
Last year I called the company that owns Penny Power and told them to stop delivering their unwanted ad newspaper to any of our addresses. I took the route of trying to make them feel stupid or weird or afraid enough that they would stop the unwanted deliveries:
FINANCIAL: Surely you’re a greedy enough bastard that you want a bigger salary and could have it if you would consider the amount of money you’re wasting delivering that thing to a bunch of people who don’t want them
PUBLIC RELATIONS: Surely you want people to think highly of your company and realize they will only consider talking badly about it as often as possible if you don’t stop those deliveries
ENVIRONMENTAL: Surely you don’t want to be reported for littering and causing destruction to the home of the nearly extinct horny toaded hooting lizard toed owl
SAFETY: Surely you don’t want your delivery employees to encounter a strangely pissed off woman at the mail boxes just waiting to toss a big box full of soggy Penny Powers into their car
Alas, the Penny Powers are still delivered and are now, apparently, providing terrific ground for poison ivy growth. And I will probably be up there at some point later today pouring a gallon of vinegar on the poison ivy and pile of soggy Penny Powers.
My only hope is that the smell of the vinegar will so vigorously repel the Penny Power delivery person that he or she will simply speed away.
But then, of course, I worry that it will equally vigorously repel our US Mail delivery person and we will all be sitting around wondering where our phone bills are.
And now I’m thinking about how you never know who, exactly, you will be repelling when you pour something like vinegar all over a situation.
And that I sure am glad Ben and I and all of those wonderful people who stood up with us during our wedding got ourselves together enough to repel any strangeness that would have taken away from that moment. Be cause it really was a great moment.
And also because Ben and I both have strange ways of trying to repel others when we are trying to focus but have become distracted.
In other words, should we not have been focused on what really mattered on our wedding day the middle of the ceremony would have gone something like this…
I would have done some bizarre little move with one of my legs and told everyone a totally raunchy joke
and
Ben would have heard someone cough or make some other noise and turned to the crowd and said something like,
Hey man! Shut your pie hole! I’m tryin’ to get married here!
Instead, the only inappropriate things that happened were:
I needed to pee right before the wedding started and let Ben’s cousin Jenny take a photo of me as I was doing so
and
Ben thought the last five people he hugged after our wedding were really excited for us, but only later realized the straight pin that had been holding up his boutonniere was sticking straight out of his shirt and he was stabbing people as he hugged them
and
we gave a wind chime to one of our cousins who was in our wedding and she said,
Oh my gooooooooooosh! Thank you so muuuuuuuuuuuuuch! I really hate one of my neighbors and I’m trying to drive her insane by putting up as many wind chimes as possible!
Hey…we’re just here to help! Even if that way is to help one of our cousins be as uniquely repelling as possible.
