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.

When the Weather Outside is Frightful

Sorry for the delay in posting. Here in our town, Jack Frost has been playing some mean tricks on us over the past four days. A huge ice storm rolled into the city Sunday night...and again Monday night.....and then it rained all day Tuesday. And then it got really cold again. And then that rain became ice.
All the ice has knocked down trees and power lines all over. It looks like a war zone here, with trees flattened all over the roads and cars smashed in from all the falling trees. On the news this morning, they said that 1/3 of everyone in the state is without power right now, and about 1/2 of people in the metro area where we live don't have power right now either. It may be another week or more before they get things fully restored.
We've been really, really lucky. We only lost our power for about 12 hours, just long enough for me to realize that I depend on the internet and TV way, way, way too much. We have been blessed enough to be able to turn our house into a refugee camp for two friends and an aunt and a cousin and three canines. What with all the extra canine attention, Riley will never be satisfied with boring old me ever again. I realized though, that we need to focus on helping him learn to share a little more, because he was fighting over toys with the DOGS. And by fighting with, I mean mostly shooting them occasional dirty glances and scurrying away to hide his toys in odd places because he was worried the dogs were going to steal them.
Yesterday morning, I went to the store to buy milk and eggs and some fresh produce. This is what I came home with:

Things are so drastic that the Wal-Mart near our house has acutally closed its doors. And many of the other stores have had their power off for so long that they are just carting away all the milk, eggs, produce, and thawed meat and throwing it away. There have been long lines at the working gas stations and restaurants with power and a rash of buglaries in homes with dead alarm systems. Don't worry about us though--my cousin found a grocery store across town with milk and actual groceries of the uncanned variety, and our freezer is stocked full of meat. We are all safe and just as warm and well-fed as ever. Not everyone is quite as lucky as us though.

One good thing about this: A small portion of Sam's final exam was actually CANCELLED because his school is without power. All the lovely corpses in the refrigerated anatomy lab that students were going to use for their final are now, well, a little on the not-so-fresh side. Good news if you're a med school student, bad news if you donated your body to science.


This was the view outside our back window Monday morning.


Our poor tree.

Tree branch on our power line... Anyone out there smart enough to know if it will be safe for us to remove this ourselves? I never paid attention during those public service announcement, "never fly your kite near a power line" commercials.

Boo for CNN!

I don't know if any of you were able to catch the Mitt Romney speech today. Myself, I caught part of it on You Tube after the speech was over. Here are some of the highlights in my mind:

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom...Freedom and religion endure together or perish alone."

"Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it. But I think they underestimate the American people."

"Religious liberty is fundamental to America's greatness."

Romney didn't focus at all on the doctrinal aspects of our Church in his speech. Rather, his entire purpose was to ensure people that religion would in no way impact the decisions he would make as president and that Church leaders wouldn't seek to exercise influence over him if he was elected.

I thought CNN's choice of the split screen in the video I posted was appalling. Boo for you, CNN! Were you even listening to the message? At the very moment that Romney was trying to separate his personal faith from his presidential candidacy, CNN insisted on printing a list for all the world to see about specific tenets of our Church and how some of those beliefs differ from other Christian religions.

It's a sad commentary of the way that most people view our Church that the whole religion thing is even an issue for Romney. And I'm not saying that I'm voting for him, just because he's LDS. All I'm saying is that it does make me mad that so many people won't even consider him because of religion.

Get your Christmas Spirit Back

On the first day of Christmas, our foster kitty left for me, a big fat dead mouse and a smelly puddle of pee.

On the second day of Christmas, our foster kitty left for me, another ugly dead mouse and an even smellier puddle of pee.

Apparently, our neighbor's cat has been peering through windows, watching re-runs of "Mr. Kruger's Christmas" and as a result has come down with a major case of the Christmas Spirits.

She has been peeing on everything in sight in the general vicinity of our house. The peeing comes after her decision to adopt us as her new owners, I think because she realizes how awesome I am. Or maybe it's because my new porch chairs are so comfy. Or maybe because our neighbors appear to have disappeared off the face of the earth and the cat looked so skinny and hungry that I just could. not. resist putting some food out for her last week. Yeah, that's probably the one.

Anyway, as part of her efforts to win us, her new owners, over, the cat has successfully killed mice three days in a row and left them lying right on our sidewalk, stretched out like prize-winning hunting trophies.

I decided to take a picture for all of you to see, just because I'm nice like that. And, because I figured if I had to look at the corpses of dead mice, so should you. So don't say I never gave you anything.


Lost your appetite a little bit there, didn't you?

Anyway, as the universe would have it, all three corpses appeared while I was home alone. So I did what any ultra-modern, enabled woman would do. I waited for my husband to come home and take care of the whole mess.

But not before I hid in my living room, peered through a slit in my curtains, and watched the mailman nearly step on the corpses two days in a row and shoot disgusted glances in my general direction.

And not before I looked around to make sure the neighbors weren't watching, then snuck outside and actually resorted to taking a picture of a dead mouse. I blame it all on blogging.