A Curious Kind of Life

Tag: real life

  • I Bought Fall Asters. That’s As Far As We Got.

    I Bought Fall Asters. That’s As Far As We Got.

    So…I bought fall asters instead of mums.

    Don’t shoot me, mum-loving readers. 😂

    I love mums. I really do. They come in all kinds of colors, they make your curb appeal look all nice and fall-ish, and they look adorable with pumpkins and gourds.

    Except…I have no pumpkins.

    And no gourds.

    And no covered porch.

    So, there’s that.

    Anyway, I read somewhere that fall asters are better for attracting pollinators, and since I already have native asters growing in the garden, I figured, What’s the harm in adding a few more?

    Then I went to the garden center.

    And there were pollinators all over the asters.

    HOW FREAKING COOL IS THAT?!

    So naturally, I bought a few.

    I had a vision.

    I knew exactly where I was going to put them. I could already picture how darn fall-ish the garden was going to look.

    I brought them home, went into the garden, and randomly placed them in their pots where I thought they looked good.

    And they did look good.

    So…I stopped.

    🤣

    It has been raining a lot lately, which means those asters have now been sitting exactly where I put them for a few weeks.

    Untouched.

    Still blooming.

    And honestly?

    They’re doing just fine.

    The rain has also meant I haven’t had to go out and water the garden every afternoon, so I’m not complaining.

    Adulting is hard to comprehend sometimes. LOL.

    One minute you’re excited because you have pretty new plants for the garden.

    The next minute you’re standing there thinking, Thank God it rained so I don’t have to water anything.

    And somewhere along the way, my carefully imagined vision for where those asters were supposed to go has completely disappeared from my brain.

    Gone.

    Evaporated.

    Apparently filed under Things Past Me Thought Present Me Would Remember.

    Instead, my brain is busy with:

    What shall we have for dinner?

    What other fires do I need to put out at work?

    Dang, I’m so tired today. My brain is fried.

    You know. Life.

    Life is life-ing.

    Meanwhile, the asters are just sitting there waiting for me.

    The main group is all together, patiently waiting in their pots to be replanted.

    They are basically the most cooperative members of this entire gardening operation.

    They’re like, “No rush, ma’am. We’ll just be over here blooming.”

    And then there are the other two.

    The two scattered asters.

    🤣🤣🤣

    Those two have apparently decided they don’t need to be part of the group project.

    They’re just out there doing their own thing.

    No meeting.

    No agenda.

    No regard for the master plan.

    Meanwhile, Past Me had a VISION™ for all of them.

    Present Me has misplaced that vision somewhere between What’s for dinner? and What fresh work fire is this?

    So here we are.

    No pumpkins.

    No gourds.

    No beautifully styled fall porch.

    No strategically placed basket of blankets.

    Because, again, we don’t have a covered porch, and I’m pretty sure putting blankets outside in the rain would not be the cozy fall aesthetic I’m going for.

    Just asters.

    Some together.

    Two wandering around like they’ve gone rogue.

    And me, apparently in charge of Aster Management™.

    Exhibit A:The Main Group — patiently waiting together in their pots.
    Exhibit B:The Two Rebels — scattered somewhere else, apparently having resigned from the group project.

    For now, they’re blooming.

    The pollinators are happy.

    The garden is getting rain.

    I’m getting a little break from watering.

    And apparently, this is my fall decorating.

    🤣

    You know what?

    That’s okay.

    Sometimes you have a vision.

    Sometimes life has other plans.

    Sometimes you buy the flowers and that’s as far as you get.

    And sometimes the flowers are perfectly happy to wait for you to remember what the heck you were going to do with them.

    Life is life-ing.

    We’ll figure out the asters eventually.

  • We Had a Plan. Then There Was a Squirrel — excuse me, Mr. Squirrel.

    We Had a Plan. Then There Was a Squirrel — excuse me, Mr. Squirrel.

    There are certain moments in life when you realize that you are completely unprepared for what is happening in your own house.

    This was one of those moments.

    It started out as a completely normal evening.

    I came home, and my husband was upstairs ripping out the carpet in the hallway. We live in a tri-level, so one of the nice things about our house is that it is really easy to keep track of where everyone is.

    My husband was upstairs.

    My son was downstairs in the dining room eating snacks.

    Don’t judge me and my son’s life choices. He was hungry. He needed snacks. This is not the part of the story we are here to discuss.

    I had just given Finn, our dog, his ice cream treat, so he wandered off toward the fireplace.

    Everything was normal.

    Until Finn started whining.

    At first, I thought he wanted another treat.

    I mean, I had just given him one.

    I basically told him, “Dude. You just got ice cream.”

    But Finn wasn’t looking at his empty ice cream cup.

    He was looking at the fireplace.

    And that’s when I thought:

    Oh, God. What is in there?

    Then I heard it.

    Scratching.

    Something was actually in the fireplace.

    My son heard it, too.

    We immediately yelled for his dad.

    “There is something in the fireplace!”

    And this is where my brain decided to skip approximately seventeen reasonable steps and go straight to disaster.

    Because obviously, once we opened that fireplace door, whatever was in there was going to come flying out at us.

    I would panic.

    I would start swatting at the floor with absolutely no direction or purpose.

    I would probably hit my husband with whatever object happened to be in my hand.

    The dog would start barking.

    Then he would chase the poor terrified creature around the house.

    The creature would run around even more because now it was being chased by a barking dog and three screaming humans.

    Finn would probably bite it.

    Then we’d have to go to the vet to check for rabies.

    My husband would have a concussion because I had accidentally hit him in the head with a broom handle.

    We’d have to call professionals.

    Someone would probably ask why we didn’t just open the door.

    And honestly, I don’t know.

    So I did what any sensible woman would do.

    I went into the garage and found an empty box.

    Because obviously, if a critter was going to come flying out of the fireplace, the most logical thing was to provide it with a box.

    I also informed my husband that I should probably not be standing anywhere near him when he opened the fireplace door because I didn’t think that was going to bode well for either of us.

    We were prepared.

    Finn got another treat so he would go upstairs to the bedroom.

    The box was ready for the critter to jump into instead of onto one of us.

    My husband put on gloves.

    We were ready.

    He opened the fireplace door.

    Nothing came out.

    Instead, whatever was in there went higher up into the flue.

    My husband closed the door and started jiggling the flue opener back and forth.

    And then—

    DROP.

    The critter fell.

    Into our fireplace.

    Inside our house.

    Our son, right on cue, asked:

    “Where is it now?”

    My husband said, “Well, it’s in our house now!”

    Fantastic.

    Our son then asked the question we were all wondering.

    “What is it?”

    My husband looked at it and said:

    “It’s a squirrel.”

    THANK GOD.

    It’s a squirrel.

    Not a raccoon.

    Not a possum.

    Not some unidentified creature from the depths of the fireplace that would eventually require an exterminator, a priest, and possibly a new house.

    It’s a squirrel.

    And because apparently we needed to make this situation even more personal, my husband decided to name him.

    Mr. Squirrel.

    I don’t know where that came from.

    I don’t know why he needed a name.

    But apparently, once you have a squirrel inside your house, you become the kind of family that names the squirrel.

    So now we had Mr. Squirrel.

    My husband tried to coax Mr. Squirrel into the box.

    Mr. Squirrel was not interested.

    He was scared.

    He had just fallen out of a fireplace into a strange house filled with humans and a dog who had been relocated upstairs.

    I can’t really blame him.

    So Mr. Squirrel decided he had other plans.

    He left the fireplace.

    And that’s when things got interesting.

    Because now there was an actual squirrel running around our house.

    Mr. Squirrel, excuse me.

    It looked like a pinball machine to me.

    You know when you’ve been holding that little lever forever and then finally let it go and the pinball shoots around the machine at approximately the speed of light?

    That was Mr. Squirrel.

    He was zooming around our house with absolutely no idea where he was going.

    At one point, he sprinted directly toward me.

    I screamed.

    Like, really screamed.

    I told my son to get out of Mr. Squirrel’s path.

    That obviously worked about as well as everything else we had planned.

    So we moved on to Plan B.

    Or C.

    Or D.

    Honestly, we were running out of letters.

    We opened the front door.

    Except we have a screen door.

    Because of course we do.

    Mr. Squirrel could see the way out, but he couldn’t actually get out.

    So onto the next plan.

    We opened the garage door.

    Which was near me.

    So there I was, holding the door open and using it as a shield between myself and a squirrel approximately the size of a baked potato.

    I don’t know what I thought the door was going to do if Mr. Squirrel decided to come after me.

    But apparently I felt safer behind it.

    Meanwhile, my husband was trying to reason with him.

    “Come on, Mr. Squirrel. We know you’re scared. That’s not the way out.”

    Sir.

    Mr. Squirrel is a squirrel.

    I don’t think he understands the concept of following directions.

    Every time Mr. Squirrel came anywhere near me, I started screaming again.

    At this point, our neighbors probably thought I was practicing for an opera audition.

    I was not.

    I was being pursued by Mr. Squirrel.

    Eventually, Mr. Squirrel apparently decided that he had seen enough of our house.

    He found the open garage door.

    He ran through it.

    And off into the night he went.

    And just like that, it was over.

    Mr. Squirrel was free.

    Our house was squirrel-free.

    Everyone survived.

    No one was bitten.

    No one needed stitches.

    My husband did not suffer a concussion from an errant broom handle.

    The dog did not get to chase a squirrel around the house.

    And I did not have to explain to an emergency veterinarian why I was standing there holding a squirrel-shaped box.

    So what did we learn from this experience?

    That sometimes Plans A, B, C, D, E, F, and G aren’t enough.

    Especially when your unexpected houseguest is a terrified squirrel who has just dropped down your fireplace and decided to explore the entire house at approximately 900 miles per hour.

    Also, apparently, if a squirrel drops into your fireplace, you should have an empty box nearby.

    I don’t know if that’s an actual wildlife recommendation.

    But it felt right at the time.

    The only other thing I know for sure is that our dinner was late that night.

    Because apparently Mr. Squirrel had plans, too.