Monkling’s Blog

Frank was out in the backyard weeding. I’m afraid it’s not only our grass that looks awful. But it’s not really our fault. Who has time to do things like yard work when you’re driving back & forth to the Bronx all weekend long, right? Yes, it seems we have turned into those neighbors who have the worst looking yard. No, wait. If I was really mean, I could describe who really has the worst but I’m above stuff like that. Anyone who knows me, knows I would never say anything like that.

Oops. I started going off on a tangent there. Back to my lumberjack story. I couldn’t allow Frank to be back there doing all the work so I went out to help him. He’s nice and orderly. He went along the sides, weeding and throwing everything out as he went along. I, on the other hand, just yank everything and leave it there, hoping to get back to it so I can throw it out. Usually he gets to it first. Hey, at least he had the 1 and only pair of gardening gloves. Mine got tossed when that yellow jacket stung me right through them that other time.

Then I noticed the back section. It seems a few wild cherry trees and who knows what else took over. I attacked back. I was sawing branches and taking down limbs. Sawdust flew everywhere. After I was done, I have a feeling Frank wishes I had stayed inside because of the pile I left behind:

I know you’re thinking I’m mean for coming inside and leaving all that. I had every intention of cleaning up after myself. The trouble is, I’m allergic to all sorts of plants. Do you know what happens when you pull weeds and get scratches all over your arms? You end up with nice, red, itching welts. Now surely no one can expect me to bag weeds and tree branches under those circumstances.

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I should be in bed now but I just had to share this follow-up story to the original Musical Rooms post.

The very evening of my original post, my sister in-law called. “Remember how I told you mom was on the 4th floor? Well now she’s on the 6th floor.”

Today when Frank & I arrived at the hospital, we told the nice man at the front desk we were visiting 604. Being the law abiding citizens we are, we did not sneak up without visitor passes because that would just be so wrong.

“Hey, we’ve never been on this floor before!” We walked all the way to the end of the hospital wing to find - an empty room. Two beds were neatly made with not a patient in sight. We looked at the name outside the door. Hmm… there was no name.

As we made our way back towards the nurses’ station, we walked down the corridor, looking at the names on each door. Just as we were almost up to the station, Frank spots our last name on a door.

Apparently the hospital staff and nursing home staff know I lead a boring, ordinary life and they are doing everything in their power to make it interesting.

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It’s not 90 degrees out, it’s not raining and we don’t have to go to the Bronx until late this afternoon so today we decided to do something about the lawn. It really can’t even be called a lawn. It’s dirt & ditches with a few sporadic spots of grass. Mostly, the state of the lawn can be blamed on the dog but it’s not like we did much to remedy the situation, either so today is the day that we decided to fill in the trenches and reseed.

Here’s Frank hard at work, filling in all the nice holes the dog decided to create. That black blob is the dog. Nicky is thinking, “Oh, good! You’re putting some nice new dirt down for me to dig in. I was getting bored with having the same dirt all the time.”

Now if there is any hope at all of this grass seed sprouting, we will need to keep the dog off the lawn. In order to do this, I needed to get a bit creative. I had a roll of black, fiberglass screening that I had purchased a while back when I wanted to try my hand at paper making. Yeah, that would work perfectly to put up a temporary fence.

After I blocked off one end of the yard, I got to thinking. “The dog won’t be able to see this at night because it’s black. He might not be smart enough to notice it in the daytime, either. I’m going to have to do something to make it stand out. This is what I came up with:

Don’t the pieces of masking tape make it look really cool?

There’s Frank in the background, still hard at work. I would have helped him except I had more important things to do like take photos and build fences.

I have no clue if this screen fence will work. I am hoping Nicky will just stop dead in his tracks when he sees it because if he wants to, he can probably walk right through it and take the entire thing down. (Shhhh…. don’t tell him that!)

As I was busy at work on the computer, uploading photos, I heard Frank call to me. “Quick! Come here!” I ran out, thinking something had happened. Did the bags of top soil explode in the street before he was able to carry them out of the car? Did the dog quickly dig a hole the size of a small pool? Did an underground nest of stinging insects suddenly emerge and attack? When I got to the door, what I saw was a dog covered in grass seed. It seems he decided to walk right into the seed spreader. Frank neglected to add, “And bring your camera!” when he called to me.

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This is a game sort of like Musical Chairs, which also happens to be a game we play when we go to visit my MIL but, naturally, involves rooms. This game is also called, “Guess What Room Mom Is In.”

When my MIL got some sort of infection and they had her back in the hospital (the famous ‘birthing orange‘ trip), she was in 3 different rooms during the 9 days she was in there. The private isolation room was at the tail end of her stay.

The hospital is annoyingly strict about having a visitor’s pass and you can’t reach the elevators without passing the front desk, although there was the time we slipped past because a fight was going on between a patient, a visitor and a security guard. Most times, though, that isn’t possible so we need to get a pass.

“What room are you visiting?”
“459.”
“No one is in that room.”
“That’s where she was yesterday.”
“Well they must have moved her. What’s the name of the patient?” and we’d have to wait for them to look up her room number. Every visit was a guessing game.

When they moved her back to the nursing home, there were no 2-patient rooms available so they stuck her in a 4-patient one. Now that was an adventure! The woman who was always cold was the one near the air conditioner. The only woman in the room who was capable of getting out of bed by herself was the one furthest from the bathroom. All 4 patients needed wheelchairs and the room wasn’t quite big enough for any 2 wheelchairs to pass each other so there was always a juggling act.

“Okay, move that wheelchair over here. Then move the other one out into the hall. Oops, that rolling table is in the way, now.”

When we went to visit her this past Tuesday, we went to the room we thought she was in and found an empty bed. “Someone kidnapped your mother!” I told Frank. Then the nurse caught us and told us she had been moved into a 2-patient room.

That evening, when we arrived home, we called my sister in-law to let her know they had moved mom into a better room. The following day, she called us to tell her they had moved my MIL again - back to the hospital. While we do have a room number, who wants to guess whether she will actually be in that room?

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I plan to blame my bad memory on hormones. I figure with hitting 50 real soon and being in that peri-mentalpause stage in life, I have every reason in the world to blame hormones.

Because of the whole bad memory thing, I need to have lists. Now while I know this isn’t all that uncommon, I do have to wonder how many people need to put every single little thing on their list. About the only things I don’t need reminders for are things like: eat, drink coffee, take a shower. For everything else, I need to write it down.

Today I did get to cross a few things off my to-do list but, for the most part, I’ve put a lot of effort into finding excuses not to do things on the list. For instance, it says on my list, “clean windshield.” Now the reason for this is the thing is so damn dirty that when we drive at night, the glare is awful. It really needs to get done. However, it’s too damn hot & sticky out. The car is sitting in the sun and there is no way I’m getting in the car to clean the windshield. When it finally does cool off enough to do it, it’ll be too dark to see anything.

Another item on the list involves throwing whatever remains in the opened bag of organic fertilizer onto the front lawn. Again, this isn’t going to happen. It’s too hot. But, since the bag is opened and sitting outside, I will need to at least stick it in the shed since it’s supposed to rain tonight. It would probably take me all of 15 minutes to throw the stuff around the lawn since there isn’t too much in the bag but I’d much rather put that off. I don’t want to cross too many items off my list or what will there be for me to do tomorrow?

Then there are a couple of phone calls I need to make to set up appointments but I am feeling unsociable and don’t really feel like talking to anyone. Therefore, that’s not going to happen, either. Yes, I know it doesn’t take much effort to pick up the phone and call the dentist to make an appointment but I’m really not crazy about phone calls because I am strange so yet another thing is getting postponed.

I think I need to make 2 lists - one for things that I really want to get done and another for things that need to be done but that I don’t really want to do.

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I’m going to do something I try to avoid on here - post something serious. Steve called me a little while ago to say he heard from a friend of his who’s under lock down at St. John’s University. There was a gunman on campus and they got him with no shots fired but there’s another one they’re still searching for so the entire campus is under lock down.

I can’t tell you how many kids I know go there. Steve went there for 2 years before getting sent to D.C. All the local seminarians attend college there. So many kids from the neighborhood go there.

They’re not cutting into the local stations with anything so that’s a good sign. The whole “no news is good news” and all that. Hopefully they’ll get the other gunman & send everyone home.

One thing I found particularly funny in all this was the announcement that evening classes were canceled.

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Like Superman exposed to Kryptonite, my super strength is temporarily gone. Unable to lift the dresser and carry it down the stairs, unwilling to wait hours and hours for backup to get the task accomplished, I turned to other methods. The solution for getting rid of the dresser would involve WFD (Weapons of Furniture Destruction). Little did the dresser know that the tools which innocently laid upon it would be the very instruments that would destroy it.

You might be tempted to feel sorry for the dresser. After all, what did it ever to do deserve total destruction? Don’t be fooled. This dresser once belonged to the Ring Thief so there was a certain amount of satisfaction in purging the one remaining trace of her from my house.

The dresser had the appearance of being built with actual wood but once the top was off, all that remained was what looked like balsa wood.

After that was removed, the rest of that dresser practically fell apart on its own. Most of it was held together with staples and glue.

It didn’t, however, go down quietly. The dresser fought back, trying to shoot spikes of wood at me. Splinters flew everywhere. Small splinters attempted a sneak attack, large splinters looking like wooden stakes you’d use to kill a vampire flew past me. I dodged them all. Within minutes, all that was left of the dresser was a pile of rubble.

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That is the question.

Our house has 4 bedrooms upstairs - a nice big master bedroom and 3 other bedrooms that are narrow as hell and can barely fit anything besides a bed and dresser.

Theresa, being a girl, seems to need quadruple the amount of space Stephen needs. His room is a bit crowded but not too bad. Of course half his stuff is with him in D.C. but, then, the same holds true for Theresa. Well except her stuff didn’t leave the state.

Anyhow, she decided she wanted her room to look bigger. This required moving the dresser out of her room and into the guest bedroom. Now if the guest room had been empty, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Not to worry! She had a solution. Naturally I wasn’t told of this solution until after the fact, when she called me to look at the furniture arrangements in both rooms.

“I didn’t know you were moving your dresser out of your room.” This happened over a year ago so I have no recollection of why I wouldn’t have figured that out. She couldn’t have quietly moved the dresser.

“I decided to put it in the guest room.”

I walked over to look in that room. “Uh, I don’t see it in here. Is it invisible?”

“It’s in the closet!” And so it was:

To this day, it is a mystery to me as to how on earth she managed to shove that dresser in the closet. I am about to solve the mystery sometime this week when I plan to move it out of there.

In preparation for the big event of the dresser coming out of the closet, this current guest room dresser needs to be removed from the room:

Now normally I have no problem moving furniture. That was before I got hit with the tennis elbow.It is mostly better but not 100%. It still hurts sometimes. Now I am faced with a dilemma. I don’t want to wait for Frank to get home and help me. I want this done now. But if I attempt to do it by myself and I damage the stupid tendon more, I’m going to have a lot of people pretty angry with me, not to mention that I am not particularly a fan of pain.

You want to know what would really be fun? If I could just open up the upstairs window and shove it out. With my luck, though, it would probably get stuck in the window. I can just picture it - half in, half out, school children and parents all gawking.

Okay, I will wait for Frank to get home. I think…

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Today is the first day of season 2. Yes, we really like this show. Then I got to thinking - if I could have 1 of their super powers, which one would I want?

The artist who can draw the future? Nah. Sure if I could suddenly paint, it would be a miracle but I don’t want to know the future. Surprises are more fun. Besides, what’s the point in knowing what’s going to happen unless you’re able to change it? That sounds like Gary from Early Edition. Now there was a good TV show. And Tru Calling.

The indestructible cheerleader? Nope, I just can’t imagine being a cheerleader. And besides, what good is it being indestructible? So you can die over and over again? No, thank you. I’ll pass on that one.

The guy who can pass through matter? I don’t see any real practical use for that other than helping people who locked themselves out of their car or house. Well unless you’re a thief. Then something like that would come in pretty handy.

The flying politician? I think the capability to fly would be pretty cool but, other than saving on airfare, would it really be much use? Sure you can fly instead of driving but you’d also have to have super strength so that you can bring others with you and who wants to fly if it’s too hot, too cold or raining out?

How about a mind reading cop? Okay, there is just no way I want to be able to hear everyone’s thoughts. Sure it might be interesting if you had the ability to turn it on & off but I don’t think Matt can do that. And there would no doubt be an awful lot of things I wouldn’t want to hear.

Obviously all those super powers might be just as much of a liability as an asset so I guess I’ll just settle for being ordinary.

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o/~ o/~ A pirate’s life for me. o/~ o/~

We don’t have to leave just yet for the nursing home so we’re watching the Yankee game. The commentators get into this conversation about eating M & Ms and then they show the bullpen and a couple of young pitchers are sitting in there eating sunflower seeds and whatever. One guy is shoving a wrapper into an empty water bottle…. I guess when they’re not pitching, they have to find ways to amuse themselves.

So the commentators are talking about how they have all sorts of snacks in there and then one guy says to the other (who used to be a pitcher), “What was the candy of choice back in your day?”

“Jolly Rogers.” We caught the mistake before they did, when the guy realizes he meant “Jolly Ranchers.”

Well I just thought it was funny and I feel a responsibility to share any remotely funny story with my fans.

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