To Clean or Not to Clean..Is that really a question?

By Jody Worsham
All rights reserved for a clean sweep 

Why is it that when I schedule the bug man to come and spray our house, I feel the need to go on a massive cleaning spree?  Before I commit to cleaning, increasing the hole in the ozone layer, and ruining my afternoon nap, I should answer the following questions.

1.  How long has the vacuum cleaner been sitting in the living room?  And is that tinsel on the handle? Christmas is just around the corner.
2.  Have the spiders completed mapping the entire universe with their cobwebs?  I'd hate for them to have to start all over.
3. Is the the dust levi about to break around the TV set?
4.  Are the grout lines in the tile even with the tile?
5.  Is the north wall fully insulted with stacked newspapers?  Could be a cold winter coming up.
6.  Are the clothes hanging on the treadmill now 3 sizes too small?  If they stay there, could be good motivation.
7.  Will the bug spray form a protective barrier or create a mudslide?  At least there would not be any more dust.

And most importantly


8.  Do any of the people on his client list know me and will he talk?

If the answer to #8 is yes, I'm donning my haz-mat  suit and going in for the clean-up.  Dirt doesn't stand a chance when it comes to a blabber mouth bug man.

Leg-oooooooo Noooooo!

By Jody Worsham

All rights reserved for First Aid

I am what you call a Wal-Mart frequent shopper/walker.  My face appears on their security tape entering and leaving their store more often than anyone in town.  It is not that I am an avid shopper; it’s just that I find myself with many separate hours to kill while I wait for ballet lessons, violin lessons, Boy Scouts, basketball or whatever to be over.   Because of this, I am acutely aware of their clearance aisles and their ever changing rotation and migration of merchandise and have a closet similar to a Wal-Mart warehouse.

At Christmas, not trusting anyone over four feet five inches, the eight-year-old had me put his many Wal-Mart gift cards in the safe.  This served a dual purpose. It prevented impulse buying on his part, and I could see which defective toys made it back to the return counter at Wal-Mart after Christmas.  On one of my recent walking tours, I noticed all the Christmas junk toys were gone, and the good stuff like Legos, were now being marked down.  Time to retrieve the boy and the gift cards.

As the Wal-Mart greeter called me by name, we headed for the toy aisle.   As usual, the clearance Legos were Legos no one wanted.  The eight-year-old headed straight for the good stuff.  When he showed me the box, three things immediately jumped out at me, first the price.  When did a toy cost as much a mid-size compact?  Second, how can 512 Legos fit into such a small package?  And third, why was a grenade wired to the box? 

I had promised myself that I would bite my tongue before I said anything negative about his selection.  It was his money, his choice, his Lego.  With my teeth clamped tightly on my tongue, he put his selection in the shopping cart. Why is it that every Wal-Mart has at least one cart with a wheel that is locked, lopsided, or lists to the left and I always end up with that one? We lurched toward the checkout stand with the loaded Legos.

 
As the cashier scanned and removed the detonating device from the Lego box, the eight-year-old pulled out his gift cards.  Card number one had either been next to my cell phone or had been used and forgotten because it was blank.  I bite my tongue.  Card number two was ok as was card three and four and my tongue began to swell. Card number five was for McDonald’s and so could not be used to purchase Legos, and card number six completed the purchase with $5.22 to spare.

 
“What’s the matter Mom? Are you crying?” 

“No, just bit my tongue.”

Next week, The Lego Wars

 

Toys R Not Us

By Jody Worsham.
All rights reserved for custom monograms!

I don't know why I buy the children toys. Years ago when the nine-year-old was a four-year-old, her favorite toy at Christmas was the box our 37" TV had come in. She colored it, I cut holes in it and it became a McDonald's Drive-Thru, a house, a fort, and a space ship among other things. The best part was that after two weeks of non-stop playing, it was in shambles and ready for the burn pile. Nothing to store, trip over, or pick up when she was through playing. And, if she wanted another one, I had only to go to the back door of Sears and pick up another cardboard box.

Yet who wants to be known as the cheap Grinch of Christmas who gives children cardboard boxes? Not I, so when little brother came along every Barbie, Ken, Cabbage Patch Baby, Tonka truck, and match box metal die cast car that ever graced a Toys-R-Us store shelf, is now piled in a baskets in the bottom of their closets. With toy chests you can't close and shelves dripping with toys classic and new, their very favorite thing to do is play in the sand pile with a rusty spoon and tin can.

Now with the never popular daylight savings time that turns afternoon play time into night time, the children have had to abandon the sand pile in favor of inside activities. Now maybe they will play with some real toys, I thought.

Last night the five-year-old came into the living room carrying a blanket wrapped around a pair of wadded up shorts belonging to his sister. I put down the book I was reading, "How to Raise Your Second Round of Kids when You Are On Your First Round of Medicare", and decided to play along.

"Well, what do we have here?" I asked.

"This is my baby. This is her face. Don't worry, the shorts are clean."

That was reassuring so I continued. "What a lovely child. What is its name?"

"Coverly"

"Well that's a very unusual name."

"Yes, but if you call her that, she'll come to you."

Which makes sense, if you think about it; your name is your name after all.

I began to think of what names my great-grandchildren might have, given who their parents will be. Probably nothing I could find preprinted on a Hallmark Christmas ornament or on hot chocolate mugs at Wally World. No Sue or Brandon for sure. I doubt "Coverly" would be on any of those pencils or calculators you find in the bookstores before school starts.

No, I'm sure expensive custom painting, engraving, or embroidering will be required for their names. At least I'll save money when it comes to toys. I'll just spray paint a tin can, add a rusty spoon, and put those in a cardboard box.

I'll write their names, whatever they turn out to be, in permanent marker. Coverly and Preseptorian will think I'm the coolest granny ever! And I will be! Cheap, but cool! After all Toys R Not Us!

It's Up and Decorated

By Jody Worsham

All rights reserved for annex tree

There are those who would say putting up your Christmas tree before December 1 is a no no. I, however, think no tree should go up before Halloween; the orange is just not a Christmasy color. November 1^st is Christmas-Tree-Putting-up-Day at our house. It helps that now we have an artificial tree; before we had to keep watering the thing and sweeping up the needles. By Christmas Day our tree often looked like the one Charlie Brown and Snoopy had.

Tree-putting-up-day now starts with a family discussion on where the tree should be located this year. Placing the tree in different rooms and different places in the room helps us remember what year it was. When the children were younger you could tell the year by the placement and kinds of decorations. If we had a toddler in the house, all the decorations began about two feet up the tree. The next year, as the toddler would then be in the terrible-twos, the decorations moved up the tree two more feet. Later as the children grew and wanted to help, most of the decorations on the seven foot tree were concentrated in the middle with none at the top and only a few on the bottom (to allow for more presents).

This year with no toddlers, the tree will be in the living room between the two sofas. That decided the hunt was on as to where the tree was stored last year so it could be retrieved for this year's placement. I used to store everything in the hall closet. When Christmas decorations exceeded the size of the storage space, I stored everything in the upstairs bedroom; however, the rickety attic stairs made it difficult getting the bins and tree box down. Since my knees were more rickety than the stairs, last year some of the decorations were moved to the barn, some made it back to the hall closet, and others migrated up the rickety stairs again. It may be February before we find everything.

At first it was easy to put the artificial branches into the tree pole. Everything was color coded and there was a diagram as to where each color went. After a many years, the colors began to wear off the ends of the branches and the color coded diagram somehow got separated from most of the tree.

One year we fortified ourselves with plenty of eggnog before attempting to assemble what was basically a jigsaw puzzle tree. That year was easy to remember because our tree resembled one of those biological cross pollinated experiments gone bad, sort of a Bonsai topiary.

The next year we decided to forego the liquid refreshment and assemble the tree first. We measured each branch, retaped each with the appropriate color of tape and made several diagrams of the colored coded branches in order to assemble it into some semblance of a Christmas tree. Now we can actually start assembling the tree on November l and have it finished by November l… of the same year and have it look like a Christmas tree.

Putting our tree ornaments on the tree for us is more a trip down memory lane than any kind of thought out well planned HGTV Design-on-a-nickel aesthetically pleasing design statement. Fifty years of tree ornament collecting and eight children's school made ornaments have left no branch tip unadorned. Once I tried to cull some of the faded construction paper Santas, the Popsicle stick reindeers, and the plastic/paper mache apples, but the creators of said decorations declared it wouldn't really be Christmas without them on the tree.

Some of our adult children have set out on their own life's journey that doesn't always allow them to be home for Christmas so when I look at the tree and see their ornaments, I think of them and wish them a Merry Christmas across the miles. As the five-year-old and the nine-year-old continue to add their decorations, I'll just have to add an annex tree. No way will I leave off those memories for the future.

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