Being at Home for Real

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I've been at home a lot this week, thanks to a bout of pneumonia.  (BTW, wow, pneumonia will stop you in your multitasking tracks.)  Anyway, I've had the unusual experience of being at home during the day without kids squabbling or weekend laundry to do.  Sometimes, I just sat in a comfortable chair in the living room.  I wrote.  I read. I watched a little television, which alternately depressed and fascinated me.  

When I watch daytime television, I come to the uncomfortable realization that I am completely out of touch with American culture.  "Real Housewives" drama exhausts me.  But, if I change the channeI, I just wonder how the man with five wives (and an unknown number of children) afforded all those familes BEFORE they were TV stars--especially since he doesn't really seem to DO anything, except run from one wife to another looking sheepish.  Then there are the talk shows, which always for some reason make me visualize a spike being driven into my brain.  I can't think!  Turn it off!  I can feel it draining all the energy from my brain cells!

Right before I turned the TV off I saw a commercial that both intrigued and disturbed me.  It was for camera that you set up in order to monitor you home remotely.  Kind of like a nanny cam, only without the nanny.  Which made me think: How sad. We're all out working so much just to afford our homes that we don't have time to BE home-- we just have to visit online.

Unless, of course, you decide to get pneumonia.   

The Pumpkin that Kept on Giving

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It has been a crazy fall, what with all the regular demands of family, work, volunteer work, the weekly tension between housework and outdoor chores (based on the state of the house, it's easy to see which I prefer).   Then, before I knew it, Halloween was here.  My younger son had his heart set on making a "steampunk" pumpkin.

Now, I have never been a mom who is skilled at crafts, but I do pride myself on one ritual:  I can carve a pumpkin.  Finding the time is the difficult thing, especially since our family was hit with our first cold of year.  We like to pass the germs around our family, then (seemingly) they mutate and come back around.  At any rate, I felt AWFUL the Wednesday before Halloween, but I was still determined to help Jack make his dream pumpkin.  Heck, I had already taken him shopping at the craft store, where he purchased several "steampunk" accessories (read: crap made in China that is designed to look old).

So that evening, after washing dishes and pushing the boys through homework and music practice, I cut the top off the pumpkin.  Jack and I emptied it of slime, even though that part grosses him out.  I cut round eyes into the pumpkin and handed it over to him.  He pushed bits of chain and other accessories into his pumpkin and, voila!  A work of art.  

It was actually quite neat, so I kept it out for a whole week. What I didn't notice was that it was gradually sinking.  For some reason it didn't grow the moldy fuzz inside that usually reminds me to throw it on the compost heap; no, instead this year it slowly sank.  As it collapsed down, it released an impressive amount of sticky liquid.  The liquid overflowed the plate and dripped down so slowly that I didn't notice it-- until I saw that our will forms were dripping wet and black mold was growing on them.

The wills are a personal albatross.  We had wills written in 2007, and then the attorney who did them was disbarred for setting fire to his own office (long story).  Then I discovered he had never filed our wills at the courthouse... so I thought it would be wise to start over.  Which in theory should have been relatively simple, because now I have pre-paid legal service that includes wills.  I called them, and they sent the forms.  I completed mine and put it with my husband's blank one on a clipboard, and set the clipboard...beside the pumpkin on the counter.

So now the pumpkin is a memory, and we still don't have new wills.  However, I have learned a valuable lesson: Steampunk is hazardous to my kids' future.   Or maybe it's the cluttered counter.  At any rate, we are not yet prepared to get off the hamster wheel of life.