Another Senseless Pumpkin Deflation

Early each morning at the crack of dawn I unwrap my day during a peaceful walk with my dog. I often snap an amusing sight and post it to facebook in realtime. These are sort of little notes to myself for blog posts. This was one such image.

These ridiculous blow-up lawn ornaments can be seen all over the zip code from late September through early January. We start with the ghosts and pumpkins, roll into the turkeys and then hit the crescendo of lawn tackiness with the vast array of Christmas offenses. There is everything from the mundane Santa through to enormous snow globes with full nativity scenes or reindeer extravaganzas.

Early each morning you can drive through town and see at least half of them deflated on the front lawns of our less tasteful neighbors. It is as if someone has driven around in the cover of night pulling the plugs on all these babies.

I swear it is not me. But I do applaud whoever it is.

In this one instance, I have a sneaking suspicion it was the patriotic ghost.

Expiration date humiliation

Ok, I will admit it. I suck at throwing stuff away. I may appear to be all neat and Virgo when you first walk in my house but the pockets of stuff are way out of hand.

Labor Day found me in a flurry of ‘I must get rid of shit insanity’, so I tackled a few kitchen cabinets.

My dear nephew who is now a big old engaged grown up, used to come to my house as little kid and check all the expiration dates on my stuff. You know, mayonnaise, dressing, ketchup. Alright, so my condiments might have been a little out of date.

Well, Sir Matthew, this blog post is for you. Here is what I found:

1. 2004. Cough medicine. Yeh, probably will be still hacking away if we took this one. (fyi, box was still sealed, could be worth something)

2. 2005. Pepto Bismol. Do you think it may still cause ‘darkening of tongue or stool’? And while we are discussing this, are you not more than a little disturbed to find a healthcare product that uses the words ‘tongue’ and ‘stool’ in the same sentence?

3. 2008. More Pepto Bismol… tablets this time. FYI, this is Gary’s favorite OTC remedy. He actually likes the taste!

Ok, there was one more thing that even though it had been in my cabinet for over 23 years(!) it will never have an expiration date and I don’t think I will ever be able to bring myself to throwing it out.

I know, awww!

When you are expecting a dead mouse you get a flood

This would be my version of We Plan and G-d Laughs. Simply put, it is never what you expect that is the thing that gets you.

We were fortunate enough to be invited to spend the 3rd and 4th with friends Out East. For those of you not from Long Island, Out East is where you want to be invited whenever you can. The Hamptons, as it is called, include some non-hampton named towns but in general the whole east end of the south fork of our lovely island is sand, sea, hydrangea, hedges heaven. We were just about getting to the gateway to the area when we got a phone message, “Ame, call me, we have ‘a situation’ at the house.”

This did not sound good.

I called back to find out that the hose under the sink had burst and not only did they have a pool in the backyard, they now had one in the basement and the beginning of one on the main floor.

What about the mouse? Don’t get your underwear in a knot, I am getting to the mouse. Sunday night, when leaving the house, a mousetrap was set to catch a little varmint that had been leaving evidence about. With this in mind, a certain member of this clan was a bit hesitant to enter the house alone in fear of finding the dead mouse.

So instead, she found a flood.

Morale of the story: bring hip waders to the beach? Nope, the moral is no matter what you are worried about, you can be sure something completely unrelated is what is going to happen.

But, this group is agile, we still managed to have a fabulous time with plenty of food, drink, and an extra helping of the saviors from the local Servpro. Thanks to my fabulous  experience with them this year, they were the first ones to come to mind. Consider this a plug for one of the most amazing operations out there for flood and fire remediations… 24/7 365!

Let the summer begin!

Wishing you all a very happy start to the best season of the year.

Take off your shoes, paint your toes any color your heart desires, go to the beach, do a little gardening, surf, sail, bike, play golf, tennis or whatever endorphin inducing pastime you can think of, BBQ, put the top down, play the music real loud, eat outside, unplug, read paper, play with your kids, your dog, your cat, your sloth (for you American Idol watchers) drink a little too much, sleep late, eat ice cream, turn on the sprinkler (not just for the kids) and most of all…

Lighten up.

Happy Memorial Day and may you wear white pants with a clear conscience.

Lord of the Flies

Or in this case, Lady. This story was just too bizarre to not share. And I am thinking of it as a sort of public service announcement in case this happens to anyone else.

A friend Facebook messaged me about an email she had sent that I did not receive for a project we are working on. This is what she said:

trying so hard to get stuff done but my house is infested with flesh eating flies…you should feature me on your blog… really…..ive been at that about to cry point since last sunday when i walked downstairs to 500 flies in my living room….uch…..

Wow, I thought, that is quite an opening line from someone I have not heard from in awhile. The visual of her lovely home infested with flies had sort of a Steven King feel to it. My response:

omg that sounds like a horror movie and no i did not get the email. what address did you send it to? flesh eating flies? WTH

I can be so sensitive.

Now here is where it is obvious that even a woman with flesh eating friggin flies in her house can still multi-task while telling her woes of this horrible episode. Here was her response:

where should i re-send to….i’ll send now…. and yes…. eat flesh of dead animal……took exterminator 3 days of coming back to finally find dead squirrel…. flies laid eggs…. on to 2nd batch hatching….. nothing they can do about it…. now that squirrel is gone waiting for them to die of starvation if i don’t get to them first…

So here is to you, my friend. Even though your lovely husband (and I do think he is wonderful) was in CA for the football game while this went down, and the little buggers seem to hide at night when he comes home so you are left to be the crazy woman in the house killing thousands of flies while your lazy dog does nothing, I still hold to the idea that we are never given more than we can bear.

And yes, I was not alone with my suggestion of mass quantities of alcohol because what else can you do in this situation but drink those little bastards away. Here’s hoping you are sweeping up fly carcasses (or is the carci?) and this will be behind you soon enough.

And hey, the offer to have the puppy come over and exterminate them still stands.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

In Dylan terms, that means I miss the basement!

If you have not been following along, I have had not one, but two floods and countless craziness that has misplaced first my stuff and then me, from the basement office.

I am happy to report that there is a light at the end of the tunnel (hopefully not with a runaway train right behind it) and I am starting to believe I might actually get back in the newly renovated office soon. (define soon).

Here is why I have confirmed that working upstairs is not for me. Yesterday would be a perfect example.

8am-10am: House renovations across the street on one side reach a fevered pitch

10am-12pm: House on the other side takes down a tree and woodchipper whines on for 2 hours

12pm-1pm: Fall clean-up with the gardener at the next door neighbor

1pm-3:30pm: landscapers come to roto-till my yard since the waterproofers left a big section of dirt (aka mud) after the drywall went in.

So, pretty much that was a solid 7 and a half hours of white noise.

No can do.

Of course that did not hold a candle to the 5 hours of jackhammering in the basement last Wednesday from the waterproofers. (that my son slept through, BTW)

So my friends, it is almost back to the basement for this noise sensitive lunatic. And I couldn’t be happier.

 

Time to Cry Tuesday – This Old F’in House

Ok, so it’s almost Wednesday. Consider this the late edition of Time to Cry. Read on and you will understand why.

Some people find the sound of rushing water soothing. Unless, of course, said rushing occurs…

indoors!

For those who have not been following, I am in the midst of the never ending office renovation spawned by basement water during the hurricane. I have purged and cleaned to the point of delirium, having reached the final stages of hacking up large office furniture and waiting for the waterproofer for weeks on end.

Enter the great washing machine fail of 2011. Yes, folks, the washer that resides in a neat little laundry closet nestled on the other side of the wall from my desk (the living on the fault line analogy does not escape me at this moment), decided to crap out in a big way yesterday morning. And with its final act of FU upon me, it flooded the OTHER room in the basement that was housing the entire contents of my office.

Have you ever heard of those people that get an adrenaline rush and can lift cars? Well this was my save the files/supplies/artwork, books, whatever the hell else I could not part with version of that feat.

It was triage, I tell you. And I was failing at first. Things like panic set in. You know that emotion that never helps any situation. So there I was with wet feet, water spewing and panicking. Not pretty. After wetvaccing with the cap off, spewing the water back onto the floor while simultaneously trying to bail out the washing machine with a wonton soup container, I was fortunate enough to have my dear friend Karen show up and pretty much snap me back into prioritizing solutions. Karen has been voted the person I will call to help bury the body. I will forgive her for asking this ill-timed question when looking around the room, “THIS is what you classified as purging? You may still want to get rid of some of this stuff… Hoarder!)

A huge I can never, ever, EVER thank you enough as long as I live to Tony and his crew of the happiest, most competent men from ServPro of Great Neck/Port Washington who came in here and saved the day. Seriously, I hope you never need them, but if you ever have water, fire, mold… call these guys before you do anything else. They are the bomb. Tony sat calmly at my table, told me this was ‘really no big deal’, had me sign all the papers while telling me that he would be out by 5 (this was at 3). ‘Um, you and what army?’, I asked.

And then then the doorbell rang and in came the army.

His guys were gentle with my stuff, respectful of my OCD need to stay organized and neat to the point of sweeping, mopping and hauling off every bit of garbage and debris. They were a whirling dervish of organized chaos. I loved when ‘C’ came in and reminded his guys, “Safety first”.

All this done with genuine smiles! Man I love these guys.

Silver lining… now the office is empty and I can paint. Want to help pic colors?

Time to Cry Tuesday – Ants, Leaks and Static on the Phones

It would seem that I have been having a smackdown with my house of late. And I am losing horribly.

For the past few weeks, along with the help of my exterminator, I have been battling a never-ending war with ants. They are determined to taunt me. Everywhere. In the bottom of the (ancient) dishwasher. In the corners of the bathroom. All over the buffet area in the dining room (thankfully after I served brunch). The last one was of horror movie proportions.

Sunday morning I, like many of my fellow Northeasterners, awoke to a deluge that could not under any circumstances end well. There was the usual water in the sump pump – almost overflowing before we were able to drain it out. Then the requisite spots in the basement that no french drain could hold. But the living room couch?! As my daughter said, “This is a two story house, how could the ceiling on the first floor be leaking?” (some weird gutter physics I do not care to go into).

And then there were the phones. Yes folks, my two lines are crossing and the static is unbearable. The online check from Verizon told me it is not on their lines (yeh, right) and lucky me… they are on strike! They would be happy to schedule me for service…

on September 16th!

But none of this really matters all that much. For Sunday morning, as I jumped between killing ants and chasing leaks, I was preparing to have my whole family at my table for brunch. Brother, sister-in-law, nephews, (and a girlfriend), cousin dog, husband, daughter, son, mother and father.

Honestly, who really cares about a house that taunts you when you can have a day like that?

A friend read me a line from a book the other day and told me she was sure I could have written it. I loved it so much I started to read the book. (Three Stages of Amazement, by Carol Edgarian – if you are interested) This was the line, “It was life, this crazy life, and if you didn’t laugh it broke you. It broke you anyway, but it was better if you laughed. 

Sort of sounds like the original premise of this blog, doesn’t it?

BTW, if you need to reach, me try my cell. And if you are wondering what to buy me for my birthday, a nice big can of Raid and a wetvac would be lovely.

 

 

The $300 Thaw

A few weeks back this household was struck with a series of annoying bad luck. Nothing all that serious, just a chain of really annoying events (ok and a few that were sort of serious but I won’t share, and thank goodness those have been resolved).

First, Gary got rear-ended on the LIE… in my car, of course. The insurance company was wonderful, we got a rental car and decided to spring for the $16/day upgrade to an SUV since it was in the midst of Snowmageddon ’11. All is well and good, it snows on top of snow and we get in the groove of shoveling every week; bitching and moaning like the rest of the world. Until…

We have completed the big dig out and Gary asks me for the keys to the rental car so he can move it into the street to brush off the snow.

I look everywhere… pockets, bags, bathrooms, nooks and crannies.

No key.

It becomes quite obvious that we have no choice but to call the rental company and get the second set.

News Flash: rental cars companies do NOT keep a second set. They call a locksmith for you. But of course on this day after a blizzard I am informed that the locksmith is snowed in. “With all due respect”, I told the woman at the rental place, “I am a 50-something Jewish woman on the North Shore of Long Island and I was able to dig out, what kind of wussy is this locksmith that he is… ahem… ‘snowed in’.”

He showed up at 4.

And $300 later we had a new key.

Fast forward to today. After a few days of record high temps the snow is melting almost as fast as it came down. And while I was out on the lawn (affectionately named ‘doody lane’ for the path we shoveled for the dog) picking up said doody, I spotted a glint out to the corner of my eye.

Yes folks, the original rental car key. As I suspected, it must have fallen out my pocket, was snowed upon and shoveled onto the mountain on the side of the driveway. Yes, other people have told me I have a Lucy and Ethel sort of life.

I thought about giving it back but decided that a shadow box frame was worth a $300 laugh in the whole of life.

Merry Overkill

I never quite understand what drives a homeowner to go these extremes to decorate for the holidays. Personally, I subscribe to the school of less is more. I cannot even imagine their electric bill at the end of the month!

It is hard to get the true feeling of this home as it sat on a very small piece of property. To the right, cropped out of this shot, was a carport with a host of inflatables atop its roof. Snowglobes and reindeer and all sorts of Santa apparitions.

I am not a fan of the inflatables. Seems lately those who like them put them up for every holiday. Their basements must look like the Macy’s parade warehouse. I particularly hate the ones that take a religious scene and try to render them in blow up materials. There is a manger scene in my neighborhood that looks like Alvin and the Chipmunks and I have a sneaking suspicion that was not intentional.

We stumbled upon the house above by accident last night and all we could think of was what was going to happen to all those decorations in the high winds and heavy rain that was coming today.

If it was not so far away I would have done a drive by for another shot. I suppose that would be a little too mean spirited, but think about how funny that decoration battlefield might have looked.