this Mayberry life

Ooh, little St. Nick

by mayberry on December 6, 2011

So tell me, does St. Nick visit your house? He never came around when I was a kid. We had to wait for Santa to drop by on December 24 like everyone else. But it seems that here in the frozen North where we live, most children are accustomed to a little pre-stocking of the stocking. When they go to bed on December 5, they put out their shoes or socks (I’ve heard both) so that St. Nick can fill them with treats. Apparently we can attribute this to our state’s German immigrant roots, although it should be noted that my mother is twice as German as I am and her mother was born and raised in this state, and yet St. Nick dissed us every year of my childhood.

For our kids, this all started when Jo was in kindergarten. We arrived at school on the morning of December 6 and saw that one of her gym shoes was missing from the shelf above her hook. I started to grill her about how on earth she managed to lose one shoe, but then noticed that every shoe on the shelf was missing its partner. It turned out that St. Nick had grabbed them all, stuffed them with goodies and brought them into the classroom.

From then on, well, it seemed that we would need to open our doors/chimney to the jolly old elf each December 5, because why would he skip over our house only to visit everyone else in town? (This also means we’re four for four on trips to Walgreens at 9 p.m. on that same night. Things that make you go ho-ho-hmmmm.)

P.S.: I also wrote more about holiday slacking in this guest post at Diets in Review.

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A.M. ride

by mayberry on September 7, 2011

Dear Wednesday weather,
WTG!

Warmly,
MM

Dear people who left a flat-screen TV on the curb,
Really? You broke it already? If so, let me Google that for you.

Your hippie friend,
MM

Dear leathery jogger,
Maybe look into some sunscreen? Or perhaps it’s too late.

With concern,
MM

Dear aggrieved driver,
I have the same right as you do to be on this road. So back off.

Sincerely,
The mom on the bike

P.S. Here’s a thought: Contact your alderman and demand more bike lanes. Then we both win.

Dear Rails to Trails,
You are awesome.

Thankfully,
MM

Dear lake,
You are pretty. But you also, um, smell. Something you ate?

Your friend,
MM

Dear roundabout,
Remember when you scarred me for life? Good times!

Still a little mad,
MM

Dear me,
I’m glad you talked me (you? myself? I?) into a bike ride instead of the treadmill today.

Love,
You know who

Dear Mom,
I’m so glad you retired so you would have time to make peach jam and bring me a jar so I could have it on some toast after my bike ride.

Love,
Your favorite daughter and grammar expert

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Postal

by mayberry on July 19, 2011

Last week I got a notice that I had missed delivery of a package and needed to go to the post office to sign for it. Now, the Mayberry post office is home to several career postal workers that come straight out of central casting, what with the Fargo-ish accents and the chit-chatting and the grumbling about people exiting the parking lot improperly and the attempts to sell local sports team memorabilia along with the stamps.

So I present my postcard to one of these guys and he goes off to fetch my package. It turns out to be a smallish but chunky envelope, hand-addressed, with a return address in Israel–a person, not a business. Naturally this is intriguing to me, since I don’t know anyone in Israel, nor have I ordered anything from there. It’s possibly even more intriguing to the post office clerk. So much so that he suggests I wait until I am a few blocks away to open the envelope.

You’ll be glad to know my pretty earrings (a birthday gift) didn’t burn or maim me when I took them out of their envelope.

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WW: Yarn bomb

by mayberry on June 22, 2011

Right here in Mayberry!

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Add an hour, add a day

by mayberry on November 7, 2010

Yesterday I was supposed to go on a day trip with an organization for which I volunteer. I’d been gone overnight a week earlier, I had a really tedious, time-consuming project to finish this past week, and I have another short trip planned for the end of this week. The thought of being gone for half the weekend was making me queasy, possibly even migrainey, so I begged off. I spent most of Saturday congratulating myself for this decision.

First, though, it was the usual skating+Starbucks with Jo. The barista has mastered three-fifths of our order by now and we are confident that she will get the whole thing down soon. Jo brought home three sample-size paper cups and then set up a Starbucks in her room for her American Girl doll. She used a small wooden chair for a table, two round dollhouse rugs for plates, carefully ripped tissues for napkins, and two toy megaphones (wide end up) for chairs.

Then we attacked the Winter Stuff Drawer. We have a set of huge (about 3′ deep by 4′ wide) built-in drawers in our downstairs hall. The bottom one is full of all our scarves, hats, gloves, mittens, earmuffs, and so forth, plus the odd baseball cap and summer sun hat. We took everything out and started over, getting rid of all the mateless mittens and outgrown hats. We sorted everything by wearer and upgraded our system of inside-the-drawer boxes and bins. When we were done it was a Thing of Beauty. And it better stay that way.

In the afternoon I actually sat and watched a football game for the first time this season (I used to plan my entire weekends around “College Football Gameday”) and got through some of my big backlog of magazines. (I’m coming for you next, Google Reader.)

And then! This morning I used my extra hour to run! This is pretty much unprecedented. All you mamas of little kids: there is hope. I slept 8 hours, worked out, showered, and dressed well before 9 a.m. Another thing of beauty. Maybe I’ll do it again next fall!

Edited to add photo of The Drawer for Kara:

It’s not as good as a locker area or mud-room, but it does house all our winter gear (for the whole family) except coats, snowpants, and boots. The drawers above hold wrapping paper/ribbons; DVDs; and CDs. ALL OF THEM. And then there is a cupboard above with shelves, which holds board games, Wii accessories, some cookbooks and magazines, and some art supplies.

Over on the Reviews tab: a sweeps where you can win books for a school library.

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Imponderables

by mayberry on October 6, 2010

…how 9 days’ worth of laundry could yield 14 shirts for one child, but only 3 pairs of underwear for the other.

…how a four-inch-long chicken bone ended up in the very bottom of the dishwasher.

…what to do with the whole (feet, head, feathers) goose and whole duck that my next-door neighbor just handed me at the back door. Thank god we have a spare refrigerator in the basement. Which I may never open again.

But I did take a picture before I shut the door, which I hid after the jump (along with a little more skeevy detail) in case your sensibilities are delicate.

[click to continue…]

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Extreme house is extreme

by mayberry on September 16, 2010

Ever wonder what it would be like if “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” came to your town? I can tell you. It’s extreme!

A family here in Mayberry was chosen for the show. Ty Pennington and company rolled up to our little Saturday morning farmer’s market to surprise them. Word had leaked out that they were one of a few families (in our region) that were under consideration. We found out later that the mayor, the head of public works, the police department, and so on had about four weeks’ notice that this family was definitely the one, but they were sworn to secrecy. If word got out the show could scotch the whole deal. My husband, representing a local business, also got a tip-off–of less than two weeks.

We returned from our trip halfway through the shoot, which was taking place about a mile away from home–and a block away from the kids’ child care center. Streets were closed for several blocks–including the dead-end one where the center is. When I took the kids in the next day, we had to be waved through by a police officer and pass all the production trailers that were using the street as their HQ. My Facebook page filled up with photos taken by friends watching the goings-on, and we walked over to check it out for ourselves.

Because Jeff was involved via his company, we got a VIP view of what was going on. The company had its own trailer and even a producer whose whole job was to make sure Jeff and his coworkers were happy–that their product got placed appropriately, they had access to the taping, and their RV was fully stocked with snacks. (Seriously.)

Fascinating fact #1:Ty films two episodes simultaneously and flies back and forth between locations every two and a half days.

By the time we arrived back in town the house was almost finished. The family came home the next day and we watched the whole “MOVE THAT BUS!” extravaganza. We know the family very slightly (one child was in Jo’s kindergarten class, several of the kids take karate at the same place with our kids, and the father teaches at the parochial school which a lot of our friends’ kids attend) so it was that much more fun for the kids to try to spot them in the frenzy. I tried to take a picture of Ty the one time he went by me but he was moving way too fast. After the family went into the house, we returned to the trailer to watch the raw footage on a monitor.

Fascinating fact #2: With enough people and some advance planning, you can build an entire 4,200 square foot house in 106 hours.

Other than having a backyard smaller than my living room, the new house is beautiful and while it is much larger than its neighbors, it doesn’t look entirely out of place and crazy. It’s, you know, tastefully extreme. Yes, there were and are complaints about how much it cost, how the money spent could have helped several families instead of one, how the property taxes will skyrocket and price the family out. They’re all valid. But the show is called Extreme Makeover for a reason. It’s on TV! For the most part, the community enjoyed the excitement and the 15 minutes of fame. The family is well-liked and from what I’ve seen, humble–in the footage we viewed, they seemed most thrilled about having bookshelves and a dining table large enough for them all, so that the mother didn’t have to eat all her meals standing up. Pretty hard to snark on that.

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Field trip

by mayberry on July 26, 2010

I tease that Mayberry is a small town, and it is, especially if you’ve come here from New York City and you are used to being able to go to Whole Foods or a really good Indian restaurant any old time you want. But it’s still basically a suburban environment. We have sidewalks and fences and two grocery stores. We do have some neighbors who keep chickens, but after their rooster caused a flap (har har), the city passed an ordinance prohibiting roosters (although hens are still allowed).

Another neighbor has a large garden, and we’ve dabbled in pumpkins and a raspberry bush. Mostly, we buy our food at the store. But this year, we’ve tried harder to buy local. Our freezer holds 1/8 of a side of beef from a farm about 15 miles away. And we finally joined a CSA. The smart folks at what we like to call “our” farm arranged to deliver produce shares to Jeff’s workplace, and we signed up immediately.

This weekend, our farmers held an open house, so we packed up the kids and drove to the farm. Photo is filched from their website, because I was too busy enjoying the visit to take any pictures (also I might have forgotten the camera). We got to meet the friendly, welcoming couple who run the farm, their three kids, their two dogs, their cat, and a bunch of their chicks and chickens. We saw their beehives and their greenhouse and the garage converted into a packing area for their boxes, complete with long wooden slide for empty boxes traveling to the assembly line. We saw their pond and their tire swing and some of the 20 acres of fields. In these fields, they grow dozens of crops for themselves and their members, and they do everything by hand with no pesticides or synthetic fertilizer. (They have some paid and work-share staff.)

We squished in the mud (there was a lot of mud) and tasted tomatoes and green beans right off the vine. It was idyllic while at the same time an important reminder of how much work goes into an enterprise like this.

We think it made an impression on the kids. When we got home, Opie created a new Mii avatar and named it after the farmers’ son. I guess that’s what happens when you take a small-town boy out of the town and into the country.

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Happy birthorial day

by mayberry on May 31, 2010

On Saturday we celebrated Jeff’s milestone birthday (the same milestone I’ll be hitting in a matter of weeks, ahem) by hitting Fleet Farm. We passed up the dairy towels, poultry leg bands, crossbows, and camouflage lingerie and bought a canoe instead. It’s red and Opie has christened it “The Duckfinder.”

We drove it home very slowly and carefully. Then we walked it down to the lake (we got it a little canoe stroller, seriously, although way cheaper than that one; Fleet Farm FTW) and took it out for a spin. Aside from the fact that the water smelled really bad (REALLY bad) we had a fine time and saw quite a lot of really big (REALLY big) fish. No ducks, although we did see a duck blind along the shore. I wished I’d had a camera with me, because inside the blind were two chairs. I really might have to go back.

Jeff could hardly believe it even though he had told me that he wanted a canoe for his birthday. And he was there when we bought it. And he hoisted it up onto the roof of the car and back down again.

It turned out to be quite a lovely way to celebrate a birthday and a holiday weekend. The Duckfinder’s been out twice, we’ve Jeff has filled all our planters and planted bunch of new hostas, we I pruned the roses, we made two big salads for two barbecues, one of us marched in a Memorial Day parade and the rest of us watched and maybe teared up just a little, and the inflatable water slide has been inflated and deflated at least six or seven times.

A good time was had by all, even the Duckfinder. Just maybe not the gigantic dead fish that’s hanging out at the end of our street where we put in the canoe. Sorry, man.

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My first vlog and it’s about flies

by mayberry on May 3, 2010

I know! How could I have chosen a more exciting and fascinating topic! This even relates to my other weird fascination with sturgeon fishing, since the flies are a major food source for the fish.

Last week I walked to a meeting about a block away from my house. It was at the height of our spring lake fly infestation. I decided that on my way home I’d try to capture it on video for you. You’re welcome! It didn’t come out the way I wanted it to (meaning: it doesn’t capture the disgustingness well enough), but here’s my first attempt at vlogging (I shot the video with my phone. If it sounds like I’m mumbling, I guess it’s because I’m walking down the street talking to myself).