After the Storm

As of Sunday, the McMurry family refugee camp has officially disbanded. I'm sure our guests have taken with them some delightfully nightmarish anecdotes about what it was like to spend a week in this loony bin. Fig, we hope such close-quarter exposure to the Riley did not swear you off of children forever.

Sam is now done with school for an entire month, and although we are thrilled to have him around, it would appear that an alien has taken over his body and sapped his ability to behave like a normal human being. On his first day home, he was bouncing off the walls like a hopped-up ping pong ball, looking for one project after another to keep him occupied and determined to "fix" our house. This "fixing" entailed dragging out all the piles of junk I had stuffed in conveniently out-of-sight nooks and crannies and leaving them there for me to come and re-organize and re-stash.

He also decided to run to the store and buy some incense to get rid of the "old-person" smell in our house. The incense did the job well enough, but it was only after everything was enveloped in a purple haze that I thought to read the packaging. "This product is known to cause cancer and certain birth and reproductive defects in the state of California," it read. Now that's some powerful incense!

Today's project was to clean up all the nasty limbs and sticks strewn all over the yard after the ice storm. Luckily, Riley is finally old enough for us to get some quality slave labor out of him.



If we would have been in my hometown, we would have just torched this entire stack of wood and had a grand old time in the process. Alas, city code here dictates such behavior is illegal. So, along with everyone else's, our pile of sticks will wait on our curb for the next few weeks until the city can finally spare the resources to come collect it.