Little Plastic Pumpkin

Zoe and my little plastic pumpkin.

Happy Halloween!

When I was a little kid, I had this little plastic pumpkin.  It had a jack-o-lantern face carved into one side, and it was heavy in my hand.  It always reminded me of a supersized Brach's Mellocreme Pumpkin.  Brach's Mellocreme Pumpkins were a staple around our house, and up to Aunt Flossie and Uncle Al's.  I loved those Mellocreme Pumpkins because they tasted like candy corn, but were good for at least two bites.

This little plastic pumpkin, too, was a Halloween staple for as far back as I can remember, back when I was a tiny pre-schooler.  Nobody remembers where it came from.  It has "Hallmark" on the bottom, so it's obviously from the greeting card mother ship.  But as for how I came into it, I can't remember (which is rare for me), and neither can my mom.

I'd forgotten all about the little plastic pumpkin.  Haven't seen it for years.  Then one day last week, when Zoe was staying at my parents' while we were getting the new carpet put in, the little plastic pumpkin turned up.  Whenever Zoe's at my parents' now, she finds that little plastic pumpkin.  It fits right in the palm of her hand, and she carries it around everywhere, like it's a piece of gold. 

Zoe has lots of toys, both here and at my parents' house.  She even has toys that are worlds flashier than the little plastic pumpkin.  But it still makes me smile whenever I see her carrying around that blast from the past. 

Why This Is Scary

All along the Eastern Seaboard, Hurricane Sandy is terrorizing people.  I've been looking at friends' pictures on Facebook, who live closer to the sea than I do, and I see people in inflatable rowboats, paddling down streets, Battery Park in Manhattan is underwater, the HMS Bounty sank in North Carolina, and at least one friend, in Philadelphia, is without power.

This is some seriously scary stuff going on.

Here in the Bing, we're still bathed in electric light.  The washer and dryer are chugging along, "just in case," but I have my fingers, toes, eyes, and hair crossed that even though the Weather.com page has us in the large red swath on the map with "likely power outages," that we'll beat the odds and keep our power. 

It's not that we're not ready if the power goes out.  We have a generator so we can keep the freezers going.  We have some gas for the generator.  I drew the Big Tub full of water earlier this morning, so we could flush if the power goes out (the pump has different voltage than the rest of the house, so the generator won't do a lick of good as far as water pumps go around here), and I filled bottles and jugs of water for drinking.  Zoe has enough packaged baby food to get her through a few days, and enough shelf-stable yogurt to get her through even more days.  I know how to use a chain saw now, if I have to.  This is as ready as I think we can be.

It's still scary.  I sit here in the house, thankful to hear the drone of the washing machine, and to see the glow of the lights, but the wind and rain are hitting the wrong side of the house.  In this area, the prevailing winds are usually from the west and south-west.  Today's windy fare comes from the north.  It's one of those things I never really think about until it's happening all wrong.

The storm prep is comforting, because at least that's something we can control.  We can go fill up gas tanks, and set food aside, and make sure we have first aid and toilet paper and hand sanitizer and water.  We can make sure the dishes and laundry are done up.  It's comforting to be busy.  It's the waiting that'll drive you nuts, and the wondering if or when the power goes out. 

It's all scary because there's nothing we can do about this Hurricane Sandy.  We can't hook up giant fans and send this bitch packing out to sea.  We can't turn on giant sump pumps and pump away storm surges.  We can't reason with her.  We can storm prep all we want, but in the end, we're powerless to stand by and watch the water rise and the winds blow.

I've said it before.  I'm a worrier.  It's what I do.  But on days like this when large swaths of the East are huddling in the wind and without power, when the wind and rain are hitting the wrong side of the house, I admit that there's something tremendously satisfying about getting through it unscathed and finding out I worried for nothing.  That's how I hope I feel on Friday, when all of this should be said and done and over, weather-wise.  That I worried for nothing.

How I Would Decorate for Halloween

Pretend that the leaves are all Halloweenish.

Well, I finally pulled my skeleton votive candle porch-standees out of the attic and put them on duty on the deck, and now the National Weather Service is advising people to bring in anything that could blow around in the wind and cause AllState-caliber mayhem on property and people.  So I'm glad I didn't knock myself out decorating for Halloween.  I just have to bring in the skeletons from the deck.

But one of these years, I have a really cool idea for decorating for Halloween, but it'll have to be a year where we don't have this cold, rainy weather.  It's happened!

See, my 1970 AMC Gremlin (pictured above) is Big Bad Orange- I named her Ginger.  And a lot of people think she's a goofy-looking car.  I think she's goofy-looking AND adorable, and is pretty much the ultimate Halloween decoration.

What I want to do is bring my Gremlin out to the front yard and park it so it faces the intersection, and then make big eyes for in the windshield, so it looks like there's a creature in the yard.  I know that the most accepted way to anthropomorphize an automobile is to use the headlights as eyes, but I'm going for big brushstrokes on this one, something that needs to be seen from a couple hundred feet away, and the windshield provides a LOT of valuable visual real estate for this.

An alternate approach to the Halloween decorations using my Gremlin would be affixing a green stem, pumpkin leaves, and tendrils to Ginger's roof and parking her in the yard to be a pumpkin.  Or I could combine the two ideas and have an AMC Jack-o-lantern, with the pumpkin bits and monster-eyes.

There's three years' worth of Ginger-based Halloween fun, right there!  But like I said, Ginger's a 40+ year-old car, so she deserves to live in the garage in inclement weather, not to be out and exposed to all the elements.  Cold and rain makes her temperamental.  I can't blame her a bit for that.  I'm a 1978, and I get cranky if I'm left out in the cold, too!  So my brilliant Halloween decoration plans for Ginger will need to wait for another Halloween, when we're not having a storm straight from Hell.  It happens every so often.  Truthfully, up until this very weekend, it would have been a good October to have implemented one of my Ginger decorating ideas.  We've had beautiful weather, all month long. 

Maybe the moral of this story for me should be to make my decorations ahead of time.  I should fashion the pumpkin stem, leaves, and tendrils right now, or as soon as I figure out and get the materials I'd need for such a thing.  I should cut out the big jack-o-lantern eyes and the monster eyes (to change things up a bit!) out of poster board and have them at the ready for next beautiful October. 

That's what I should do.  I want to be more festive around here.  Not Griswald-festive, so the neighbors call me at Christmas to ask me if my house is on fire, but I could do a little better on the outside-decoration front.  I really could.

But right now, I'd better go out and fetch the skeletons from the deck.  I wouldn't be so happy to wake up one of these mornings and find Frankenstorm pitched the skeleton decorations through a window, or grazed the Jeep with them.  Mother Nature really could have decided just to soap everybody's windows instead of this giant mother of all storms crap.  I mean, seriously!

I'll Be Back Monday!

Hi, Friends!  Don't worry.  I haven't gone out of the blogging business again.  It's just, we've decided to turn our house all upside-down, re-arranging things.  It's a lot like moving, without the U-Haul or housewarming presents.  In other words, everything is strewn everywhere, and I need to get things back in order this weekend.

I'll be back with my posts on Monday, October 29th.  In the meantime, you might want to head to the Wal-Mart and buy your strawberry Pop-Tarts and beer.  I hear a storm's a' comin'!

This Is War

The house is under attack!

It's that time of year again, when the rodents that are supposed to live outside come inside.  It's just that I thought we'd be immune to the rodentine invasion this year because over the summer when we had all that digging done around the house, we had a RAT in the house that Shane and I both saw.  Shane tried to kill it on the basement stairs when he chanced upon it.  He saw the rat, the rat saw Shane, and he chased it down the stairs, trying to jump on it.

Even though I was upset that we'd have to live with the rat until another method of assassination proved successful, I'm kind of glad really, really glad that Shane missed when he jumped from the third-from-bottom step.  I would have hated to see the aftermath of that, and plus, he probably would have had to throw out his Lugz he was wearing.  I mean, that's what you'd do, right, if you killed a rat in your shoes?  You'd throw the shoes away.  Even if they were only on their third wearing, because you just wore them when you jumped on a rat to kill it.

Thankfully, we don't have to ponder that dilemma much, because like I said, Shane missed that big rat that day.

After the incident on the stairs, I saw the back end of the rat that was in our house.  It had a big rump.  I cannot lie.  I'm surprised it could haul that big butt into the space between the washing machine and the dryer.  It was a biiiiiiiig backside.

Besides just the creepy factor, I was seriously worried about my washing machine and my dryer.  A rat can do serious damage.  When we lived in the Domicile of the Damned, we always involuntarily played host to lots of different kinds of rodents, since the foundation of that house had more holes in it than a colander.  And one time, a rat chewed a hole in the drainpipe of the dishwasher.  We had to use epoxy putty to fix it, because it was right in the elbow, and we were going to be moving soon anyway.

Back to the rat in my house where I live now.  My dream house, which isn't a Domicile of the Damned.  It's actually really nice place to live.  Like rats do, it kept carrying off the rat traps Shane put out.  I readily admit that Shane's the one who deals with extermination duties, because about wildlife of any kind in my house, I'm a disaster.  Out of desperation, Shane ordered an Electric Rat Trap that I've since named Big Yella Momma, just because that makes me howl with laughter whenever I think about it.

The very day he ordered that trap, though, there was a standoff in the kitchen.  Thankfully, it was after Zoe had already gone to bed for the night, and it was late enough that Rozzie had already been carried upstairs.  Shane had the rat cornered and told me to run for his shoes and a shovel.  He was going to take care of that rat then and there.  I brought Shane the shovel from the basement, and his slip-on shoes, and did what anybody with as much courage as I have would do.  I made a beeline for the front stairs and barricaded myself in our bathroom, with my ears plugged and Rozzie staring at me like I was crazy.  So I don't really know how Shane got the rat, but it involved the shovel, and an entire roll of paper towels and half a bottle of Clorox Clean-up.

Because of all of that Drama of the Rodent Kind, I really hoped that this year, the regular mice that usually invade the house when the weather cools and the house warms would just figure our house is Off Limits.  Big Yella Momma is in the house, after all, and if it'll zap a rat to death, it'll turn regular mice into crispy critters (it just has to be taken out of its packing box and plugged in!)  But no.  After Shane took Zoe up to bed tonight, I went to the kitchen/laundry room area to turn off lights, and I saw the floor move.  What I wanted to have seen is the floor move, I should say.  We have gray slate-looking ceramic tile out there, and I saw grayness dart from under Zoe's changing station toward the dryer.  Why do they have such a fascination with my dryer?  Don't they realize that if they ruin my dryer, Maytag doesn't make that kind anymore, and I will go so deeply into mourning that... I don't know.  I'll be upset if there's ever No Fix to my dryer.

And I realized that in this war between Human and Rodent, there is no armistice.  There is no peace treaty that if they just stay outside and don't come in, we won't kill them, and if we leave them alone outside, they won't come in.  Mice and rats are by nature sneaky and they go back on treaties made with them.  It's like they don't even know about them!  Sneaky little jerks!  So now it's Fall, and they're flocking to the warm house, where they're most certainly not welcome, and we have to fight to protect our walls and floors and dryer.  And we will.  We have Big Yella Momma, and we won't hesitate to use it.  And if Big Yella Momma fails, Shane's really handy with a shovel, apparently, and isn't afraid of a little hand-to-hand combat with a rodent.

Huzzah!

Pessimism With A Purpose!

In the circles I find myself in, worry and pessimism seem to get confused and tangled up in a ball together, and I don't think it's entirely fair.  See, I'm a really good worrier.  I've had ulcers eaten in the lining of my stomach at an astonishingly young age because of my propensity for worry.  And I've been accused of being a pessimist because of my worrying.  That just isn't true.  Bear with me.

"Worry is just borrowed trouble," I've heard it said.  Sometimes, it's true.  If you're worrying about things you can do absolutely nothing about, like what if a giant asteroid hits the earth and wipes us all out in an instant, that's just silly to do.  Not much we could do about it, not much aftermath to clean up.  No point in worrying about it.

I do my share of worrying about stupid stuff like that.  But I'm trying to be better about it.  Other things, though, I don't apologize for "borrowing the trouble."  Instead of looking at it that way, I like to think of it as thinking through all possible scenarios and figuring out ways of handling them.  Escape plans, contingency plans, avoidance plans. 

Think about it.  What's the first thing they do when you're on a commercial flight?  They go through the escape plan.  They tell you where the emergency exits are.  They let you know your seat cushion is a flotation device.  They show you how to put on the oxygen masks if they come out of the ceiling.  They're not saying the plane's going to be involved in an emergency, but in case it is, they want to make sure you know what to do.

When I stay at a hotel, the first thing I do when I get in my room is eyeball the Fire Escape Plan on the back of the door, and you can bet that while I was on my way to the room, I had my eyes peeled for where the stairways and red exit signs were.  I do the same thing in theaters and auditoriums and the arena when I go see hockey games.  I want to know how far I am from the nearest exit, and I spend at least a few seconds visualizing how I'll get there if I need to.

I think it’s smart to think through situations other than potentially life-or-death, though, too, so I'm not caught so flat-footed.  By nature, I'm Emotional, capital E intentional.  High-strung.  It's a ginger-thing.  We wear our hearts and nerves out on our sleeves.  I do think we're more sensitive than the rest of the population, we redheads.  It's not really a flaw or a shortcoming (it can be useful sometimes), but I do think it's something in myself I need to recognize and acknowledge and plan for, especially when dealing with people who have an inability to empathize or people who get off on pushing other people’s hot buttons.  If you leave your hot buttons all out and exposed, they’re going to get all kinds of pushed.  Believe me.  It’s best for me to be prepared before it happens, to handle it.

It’s not just about trying to avoid fights with a certain set of people, though.   It’s also about being prepared for making decisions.  To some people, it looks like I just haphazardly decide things, but if it’s something I’ve seen coming for a while, I slip off by myself, do a lot of reading, a lot of paying attention, form my case, and start laying the groundwork for a plan.  It makes me less indecisive and more confident in what I need to do.  I don’t like to deny something, as unpleasant as it might be, and convince myself that it’ll all be okay, and then find out that the storm of crap is every bit as awful as it could be, and instead of having an idea of which way to jump ahead of time, a lot of hard decisions are needed to be made while inside a dense cloud. 

I just don’t understand people who choose to ignore the warning signs of something Big coming, who hope that by not thinking about it, it’ll go away, and then have the audacity to be shocked when the result of ignoring warning signs comes around and hits them smack in the face.  Then they’re left to scurry like rats on a sinking ship, flailing around wildly, trying to process everything, a tall enough order before you even add in trying to make rational decisions in the face of all of that shock.  I really don’t understand when this happens over and over in some people’s lives, why they don’t start thinking a little bit farther ahead, even if it means thinking about things that are unpleasant.

I don’t mean dwell on potentially bad situations.  I mean just think far enough ahead to have phone numbers at the ready, and a contingency plan or two in place, for when things happen.  For instance, I don’t sit in my house and dwell on “What if something happens to Shane and me, and we leave Zoe behind?”  But I’ve thought about it enough to have talked it over with Shane, and to have measures in place for where she goes if something awful happens to the two of us.  It was unpleasant to think about it, but now we know where she’ll go, and that she’ll be in good hands, should anything happen to us ever, and my sister and her husband wouldn’t be Shocked to find her on their doorstep in the event of the worst.  I sleep better at night, knowing that this is in place.  I think it’s the same idea when people write out their wills.  Unpleasant to think about, yes, but much better than leaving everything up to guess work and then spending the afterlife all pissed off because the fam didn’t know your last wishes, therefore didn’t carry them out right.

I think that thinking a little bit ahead to what COULD come about makes me feel more empowered and less hopeless, less like the universe is picking on me.  I’ve noticed that a lot of times, people who choose to curl up in a ball and deny, deny, deny have kind of a ‘woe is me’ air about them when things do go south on them.  Everything is suddenly terrible.   How dare this happen?  If I’ve done my job, I see the storm coming and I have the flashlight and enough jugged water ready, figuratively speaking.  In the event of a real power outage, I usually lose my stuff altogether, at least for a couple minutes.  I’m working on it.

You know the cliche.  Optimists see the glass through their rosy-colored glasses as half-full.  Pessimists see the glass all gloomy and half-empty.  I don't hang out in either of those camps.  I really don’t, no matter what my husband says.  I see the glass for what it is.  A glass that's either half-empty or half-full, either way, there's room for more, and I make a plan to fill that glass on up.  I’m not usually a gloomster.  I don’t like to hang out in the murk at all.  I really do fight to see a bright side to things, but it doesn’t come naturally to me, rose-coloredness.  I don't know what to call myself on this one.  Not a realist.  A Worrying Warrior?  Maybe a Pessimist With a Purpose: Preparedness.

Yeah, I can live with that label!

Windmills on the Ridge

Monday, we drove to Danville to see Shane's grandmother, who's at Geisinger with some really serious stuff going on.  The ride down was one of those kinds of rides where any and all distractions are welcome.  Really welcome. 

So with that in mind, imagine a sapphire-blue sky, hills of orange-yellow-and red-painted leaf-covered trees, and white wind turbines planted like great big tri-petal flowers, and imagine my delight at the sight.  Despite the controversy and bile and chest-beating and rhetoric on the subject of wind farms, especially in the area where I live, they've always fascinated me.  Back when I was flying my airplane all over the place, I would be downright gleeful to see the wind farms in New York State.  It meant I was almost home from Batavia.  They have navigational landmark value to pilots.  The first time I saw a real-life wind turbine on the ground, we were headed to a Sabres game.  It was the time of day in the winter when the sun has gone down behind the hills, and the snow and bare trees and sky and the very air take on a powdery quality.  Those tall wind turbines on the wind farm along a road called Centerville Road, looked silvery and shimmery, a little ghostly and surreal, a little like giant alien sunflowers.  I couldn't take my eyes off them.

Monday, the wind turbines were turning gently in the wind that was running along the ridge.  We were heading south-east somewhere between Mansfield and Williamsport on Interstate 80 in the late morning.  I needed to see something whimsical, and in this frame of mind, the wind turbines, wind-flowers, standing chalk-white in contrast to the metallic blue cloudless sky and the magic red leaves, fit the bill.  They were comforting to me.  It felt like the wind turbines were waving and saying that everything is going to be all right at Geisinger, no matter what happens.  I couldn't take my eyes off them.

It was that kind of day.  Things in this world can be really ugly, terrifying and out of control.  When things start feeling like this for me, I really start looking for the beauty in everything.  I found it in spades in those wind turbines on Monday.  I'm not trying to stir up controversy about the wind farms, but I know all you have to do around some people is utter the words "wind" and "farm" and they'll turn into screaming banshees.  I don't have time for this.  This is my blog, and I have a free pass to come right out and say I think the windmills are beautiful.  If you disagree with me and have your own blog, feel free to badmouth me in your corner of cyberspace, and then guess how much of a flip I give.  You see what you want to see in the world, I'm more convinced of this every day.  If you want to see fear and ugliness, that's what'll greet you at every turn.  If you choose to see the beauty in things, the world becomes a much less scary place.  In those windmills on the ridge, I choose to see wind-flowers waving in the breeze at me, reassuring me that no matter what happens in Danville over the next few days, things are going to be all right.  I choose to see the beauty.  That's all.