Jenyfer Matthews

I don’t have deer or foxes in my yard as my father and step-mother do or fluffy llamas either. What I do have are squirrels. Lots and lots of squirrels.

My landlord’s son advised us not to put our jack-o-lanterns out too soon in October because the squirrels in the neighborhood were known to attack them. I believe it – the squirrels in this area are some of the biggest, fattest squirrels I’ve ever seen. I totally believe that they would attack a pumpkin. I’ll bet they go down the street tipping over garbage cans on trash night too.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a gang of them ambushed a kid on the way home from the corner store for his or her junk food. Surely they can’t get so plump just eating acorns??

I’ve never seen a raccoon here but if they are around I’ll bet 1) the squirrels give them a run for their money and 2) the raccoons must be giants!

We have gray squirrels, red squirrels, and even a few black squirrels. But I looked out of my kitchen window yesterday and saw a squirrel like no other I’ve ever seen. Of course I had to get a picture.

Check out that red tail!

He was quite shy and it took me a while of standing very quietly to get his picture. Do you think the other squirrels tease him? Do squirrels have litters? I wonder if he has any brothers or sisters who have the same coloring or if he was the oddball? I haven’t seen any others with this coloring and I’m sure I would have noticed!

Mother Nature really does have a sense of humor.

Babies are cute and it can be amazing to watch a toddler explore their expanding world, but I love talking to my children now that they are older. Their perspective can be so different and more creative than my own. And sometimes they are just flat out funny, especially when they don’t intend to be.

I had to take my son to the doctor for a second time when he was since last month (where did January go, by the way??) We went to an urgent care facility because it was a weekend and ended up sitting in the waiting room for about an hour before we got in to see the doctor. Many other people were also waiting, including a young couple with a toddler. The toddler was not pleased by the waiting and was alternately running around and wailing. My son was watching the toddler and getting irritated by the crying. He made a few comments about the child and what he thought the parents ought to do, none of which were helpful or practical. Then he asked me “Where do babies come from anyway? I mean, do you just like get them randomly?”

I paused for a moment before I answered and in that short moment thought oh my god he wants to talk about that now and I want to tell him myself so he has good information and not whatever nonsense his friends might tell him but honestly I didn’t want to start that conversation at that time and place because I was sure that it would lead to more questions and possibly some strange faces. So, I calmly said, “I don’t really want to have that conversation here, in this waiting room.” He nodded, without protest, and then asked, “What’s your favorite food?” All that private panic because the boy was bored! (I haven’t heard a word about babies since.)

Over this weekend we had a family movie night and watched Freaky Friday with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan (before she went nuts). The movie was cute and the kids enjoyed it. Afterwards, my daughter looked at me and said, “It would be easy being you – all I’d have to do is clean!” Um… I guess she hasn’t looked in that room full of boxes lately! If “all” I had to do was clean, that room wouldn’t look like that!

(I on the other hand wouldn’t go back to 6th grade for any amount of money – the girl drama this week has been insane and heart-wrenching to watch.)

Last night I made a stir fry for dinner and decided to try and entice my son into eating it (not his favorite dinner) by including fortune cookies at the end. We all chose our cookies and read our fortunes out loud. My daughter’s fortune was “You will soon discover your hidden talent.” My son looked at her and said, “You have a hidden talent?!?” The tone of his voice was so indignant, like she’d been keeping secrets from him.

In other news, the children have been such slobs in their “kid zone” downstairs, openly disregarding my absolutely no food downstairs rule that I took drastic action. After I had threatened to cancel the cable TV downstairs and then spent two hours cleaning up their space and still found food wrappers and bottles under the furniture and in the corners, I decided I could be sneaky too. I found their floor, organized all their things so they could actually find and use them, and then unplugged the cable wire and told them I’d cancelled service. They were fairly contrite and resigned when they came home from school and discovered the TV no longer worked. Their only question was for how long.

Frankly, they don’t seem to miss it much and I’m enjoying the silence. I might just cancel it for real. Having no TV has very effectively put a stop to the food smuggling too.

In case I’ve given anyone the impression that I’m the model of organized efficiency, I thought I’d confess: I haven’t unpacked a box in about a week. The children were home sick and frankly, I needed a break. Just take a look at what I have yet to deal with.

My goal this week is to do some more unpacking, and to clean off the dining room table. It is a good thing we have a kitchen table because the dining room? Out of control.

I am not a neat freak by any stretch, but this is ridiculous. When things get to this point, I can’t do anything creative – I can barely even think.

If my whole house looked this way, I’d be depressed. I’ve worked pretty hard to make sure that didn’t happen. Just take a look at the cozy corner I created for myself to write and relax.

Honestly, where would you rather spend your time? Can you blame me for preferring to sit in my red chair and dream rather than deal with all the other stuff?

I started doing yoga about 7 years ago when a friend in the United Arab Emirates volunteered to lead a class, took a couple years off, then got back into it in Cairo when a neighbor of mine adopted a studio and started a cooperative effort with some other instructors. I’ve tried going to gyms and also swimming but with the exception of water aerobics, which I also love once I get over getting into a cold pool (yikes!), yoga is one of the few exercise oriented activities that I will stick with. I despise gyms and swimming is boring.

As much as I love yoga, I rarely do it at home on my own. I need a class to keep me going. When I was in Cairo, I even had an instructor who would send me texts if I missed a class! Going to class is great because 1) there is variety and feedback in a class that you don’t get from a DVD, 2) I work out for longer and do positions that I might avoid if I were working out alone, and 3) I always push myself harder in class.

A lot of people profess they love yoga because it’s so relaxing, and it is. I’ll admit that I go to yoga class and compete with the others in class.

I know it’s not a very yogic attitude, but I want to be the best yogi in the room. I am not always the most flexible because of my lower back issues, but I want to be the strongest, hold my balance the longest, and do the most challenging of the pose options available. My approach does not exactly promote my inner peace and harmony quotient but it does usually end up giving me a heck of a workout.

Just in case you think I’m the only sick puppy comparing myself to others, a couple of times I have had people come up after class and compliment me and ask me how long I’ve been doing yoga because they’ve obviously been checking me out too. One of my proudest moments was when I inspired yoga-envy in a couple of young women in their mid-twenties by holding the plank pose for longer than they could.

I could claim that I was giving them something to aspire to, but in fact I realize that I’m slightly twisted. Slightly twisted and fairly strong.

And very, very competitive…

I’m not normally a hugely superstitious person, but lately, I’ve been doing everything I can to improve my luck. Can’t hurt, might help, right? In that line of thought, I’m really mad that I missed the fact that it was Chinese New Year yesterday.

There are some things you are supposed to do to prepare for Chinese New Year – one is thoroughly clean your house on Chinese New Year’s Eve. Hmmm… I did a bunch of laundry on Sunday but I didn’t do much else. Then on Chinese New Year’s day you are not supposed to sweep and are in fact supposed to put all brooms away – the idea is that you might sweep away your good luck.

Well, I totally missed out on that one.

It all started when I was shifting things in my kitchen around. I reclaimed a previously forgotten, empty, LARGE drawer, which freed up a good bit of shelf space in a cabinet, which in turn freed up another shelf in another cabinet, which is where I decided to stow my cast iron skillets which had been living on the stove top and were generally in the way when not in use. After I’d moved the skillets, I was wiping off the stove top and saw a drip going over the side. I decided to pull the stove out a bit to wipe the drip up in the interest of being tidy and also because the stove is the last place I saw the mouse last month.

Back in December, I put some trays of poison here and there where I thought a mouse (rat??) might have gotten in and also tossed a few cubes into the garage to keep the buggers out of my car engine. Each tray is about 4″ square and maybe 3/4″ deep. The one in the laundry room looks untouched, as does the one under the sink. I decided to check the one under the oven as long as I had it pulled out.

It was ENTIRELY EMPTY.

OMG OMG OMG. You know how you read historical novels and people just faint? I’ve always wondered about that, but I swear I could feel my blood pressure shoot up. How on earth could that whole tray be empty and yet we’ve seen no dead bodies? Even if it had carried all those pellets away to its nest, surely it would have gotten some in its system if it was carrying them in its cheek? I assume it didn’t have a little backpack!

I’m not a huge fan of poison, but I’m also not a huge fan of the idea of wounding a mouse in a trap – or even cleaning up a “good” kill. (A friend of mine told me a hideous story of setting a trap for a rat in NY and hearing the trap “snap” and then being dragged away!) I truly hope that the mouse / rat took all that poison back to his little rat home outside my house and shared the bounty with his extended family. I contemplated getting some expanding foam and sealing around the outlet for the stove, where I assume they are getting in. Instead I decided to sweep the floor of crumbs from my son and put down a fresh tray of poison in the known hot spot, along with a twist (disposable) trap filled with peanut butter.

So I admit I swept and I took out the trash, both bad luck things to do on Chinese New Year, but neither the dust nor the trash has technically left the house yet. Also, I took a shower but I skipped washing my hair – another bad luck thing to do on Chinese New Year. Maybe I have half a chance of having a decent year after all.

If declaring war on a mouse / rat is considered an auspicious thing to do in the Year of the Dragon, that is…

They say bad things happen in threes. All of mine came in pairs this week.

I’ve had two children home sick from school all week. For once, I followed my instincts and took them to the doctor sooner than later and it was a good thing I did because they both had strep throat. They are both on antibiotics now and have a four day weekend over which to fully recover (and catch up on all their homework).

I myself have spent most of the week washing my hands, washing clothes, fetching snacks and drinks for my patients, and continuing to unpack boxes. I can finally see some progress! In spite of the poor condition of many of the boxes, most of the contents made it just fine – with a few notable exceptions. I found a second pottery piece that broke in transit, this time the lovely mask I made. (Right along the hairline, where a crack had developed in the glaze firing) I found a loose handful of change wrapped up in a wad of paper the size of a softball, but the mask only rated a couple of sheets of paper. Sigh.

However, in the spirit of opening myself to the wisdom and power of the Universe, I’ve decided to look for the positive sides of these situations. With regard to the sick children, at least they were both sick at the same time which (I hope) means they will return to school simultaneously as well. And having them both get sick (a fairly rare occurrence) prompted me to finally find a family doctor who was accepting new patients – not that I was able to get in to see him this time, but I’ll be ready for next time.

As for my pottery, I was whining about mentioned it on Facebook, and a friend of mine from Cairo wrote me a message: his MIL lives in a city about 20 minutes away from me and not only is she a garage sale / thrift store fiend (like me!) but she is also a potter. He gave me her email and said she might be able to help me repair my broken pieces. How is that for the Universe providing a solution to a problem?

So why did I pop awake at 3am this morning, the one morning this week when school is closed and I knew I didn’t have to get up? You could say that the Universe was trying to gift me with some quiet time to get a bit of writing done before the usual distractions of the day begin. Or you could just assume the Universe has a sense of humor…

I’m even posting a day early!

I’m still working on unpacking boxes and so far so good for the most part. It’s amazing how much trash you can manage to stash away in the corners and closets of your home just in case. Having just spent several thousand dollars to ship empty appliance boxes, plastic grocery bags, rag clothes, and expired medications ask me how I know.

I have been working my way through things, box by box. Some things I need to unwrap just to see if they made it okay and am just as quickly putting them back in their boxes for now. Most things made it just fine, however the couple of things I have found that broke so far were very wrenching. One was a large ceramic plate that goes with a beautiful Vietnamese tea set that I bought in the Russian Market in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The other casualty was the large pottery lizard I made myself in Cairo. Why on earth they thought it would be okay to stand it on end on its tail – the most vulnerable part of the entire piece – is a mystery to me. Ironically, another large plate that matched the dishes which were part of our furnished apartment made it just fine, though in fact it ought to have stayed behind. Oh well.

I’ve also had two sick children home this week. When my son told me he didn’t feel well on Monday morning, I was skeptical. He’d been just fine all weekend when it came to birthday parties and a sleepover so it seemed a little convenient that he’d be sick just in time for school. As it turned out, he wasn’t faking. After he had a fever for the second day running and his throat became so sore he found it painful to speak, I took them both to the doctor. The doctor suspects strep throat. I’m hoping that I can nip it in the bud in my daughter’s case, but it looks as if they will be home for the remainder of the week.

While I was at the store waiting for their prescriptions to be filled, I took a spin around and found some raspberries on the discount rack. I love raspberries. I decided to buy these to make a raspberry sauce. Since we still have a few carrot cup-cakes in the freezer from my birthday last week (with frosting in the fridge) I was thinking of sticking the raspberry sauce in the freezer and keeping it for Valentine’s Day when I could make a shortcake to go with it. Having taken a look in my stuffed-to-the-gills freezer I think I’ve gotten way far ahead of myself! Perhaps I should just make some waffles instead.

Anything to get away from boxes for a while…

You saw part of the mountain of boxes I have to sort through on the Wednesday post. It is not only the sheer volume of stuff that makes this challenging, but the way the boxes are labeled.

I deny having every sewed any of my quilt patrons!

It’s a good thing I’m fluent in pigeon English! I do believe this includes “purses”.

And this box contains and African DRUM.

I admit – this one had me stumped.

Apparently “KW” means kitchen ware and “flavors” referred to spices!

I think they could have been more accurate in this label…

They could have labeled it “ducks”!

Then there were things that I bought in Egypt and they were very specific and confident in how to label! This is a small padded bench / seat I bought that is fashioned in the manner of a camel saddle.

I was really hoping that this label didn’t mean what I thought it meant.

And yet it did… sigh. I could have lived without seeing all those shopping bags again! (Or the bag of dead tennis balls or the half a dozen flat soccer balls they packed)

Really, I have to find humor in this situation or I’d cry. So much that should have been purged was shipped. And apparently there was one weak link on the packing team who had an aversion to using any sort of packing paper to cushion things. I have found boxes where there is a jumble of things tossed into it, one of which contained my cast iron skillet on top of the rest. A mirror I quite liked was packed in a box of toys for some reason, wrapped in my son’s fleece blanket. It broke. I am putting any associated bad luck on whoever packed it. And why did they box up empty suitcases? Could they not have used them for quilt fabric or clothes??

While I am busy unpacking household things, I left the books to my husband. It may not sound like much, but just take a look at this.

Having hefted the boxes of books into his cave for him to unpack, I am dropping some not so subtle hints that he needs to think about weeding his collection…

In spite of the fact that I didn’t bake anything except a pumpkin pie (our neighbors stopped by on Christmas Eve and brought some cookies which we set out for Santa), and in spite of the fact that I bought a duplicate DVD for my daughter which I realized in the nick of time and replaced with another and a video game for the wrong gaming system which I didn’t, I declare this Christmas a success. Everyone seemed pleased by their presents and there was good cheer all around. You can’t ask for much more than that.

Both the kids profess to still believe in Santa, though I think that time is running short – at least for my daughter. She’s asked me point blank about the Tooth Fairy (I evaded the question) but has not asked about Santa. One reason that I think that Santa survives scrutiny is because he is so much nicer than me.

I don’t buy my children things constantly – I’m pretty much a birthday / Christmas kind of mom. I’ll get supplies they need for school or sports, but other stuff? Special occasion or allowance. Santa ends up bringing all the things they children have been begging for all year that I have said ‘no’ to – like the Pillow Pets I have denied the all year. He also WOWS them with gifts that they didn’t know they wanted – this year he brought them a portable ping-pong table. How can mom compete with that?

Not only that, Santa fills their stockings with candy and goodies that Mom has to try and put the brakes on – after all, Santa isn’t here to pay their dental bills. Santa is a great guy, isn’t he? I kind of wish he still brought me things!

At any rate, we have all survived another Christmas, even if there wasn’t any snow. Bring on the new year…

Not even a MOUSE!

I have seen neither ears nor tail of my mouse visitor, dead or alive. (Yes, I choose to continue to think of it as a “mouse” though a few people have suggested that it sounded too large to be a mouse – I don’t wish to follow that train of thought!) My holiday wish is that s/he has vacated the premises never to return.

I hope that wherever you are, whatever you are doing, you have a wonderful weekend full of joyful surprises.