If it Had Been a Snake

Anyone ever see the game show Lingo? Me neither--that is, I had never seen it until by chance this afternoon. The Bunny was about to go to work, and we were absent mindedly flipping through the channels. The word-guessing game caught my attention, and we got involved in the action as Liz and Christopher fought to beat John and Laura for the final championship round. Something odd started to happen, however, and I'll let you tell me what is wrong with this picture:
Really, Laura is about as confused as I was, though Christopher seems positively delighted.

Something is in the water--that, or the local 11% unemployment rate has got people moving and shaking to make a change. Two more people I know are having babies, while others are considering major life-altering moves across the country. I, on the other hand, am stuck in good ol' West Tennessee writing about Game Show Network innuendos and editing another chapter on incest portrayals. Sometimes I wonder where I went wrong in life?

Then again, I did snap and blanch some homegrown green beans from the Bunny's grandmother, Louise, and I'll probably saute the whole lot for dinner tonight. I have a bold cup of coffee in my favorite 4-H mug sitting to my immediate left, and my chunky pug is snoring at my feet. The voluntary crape myrtle that landed, took root, and grew into a tree outside our kitchen window is in full lilac bloom. I just found a surprise cucumber on our vine. I didn't even see it growing until it was time to harvest. We don't have much money in the bank, but every bill is paid, and I love my hard-working husband. Maybe it is everyone else that can't see past the C-U-N-T to the C-U-R-R-E-N-T issue at hand.

Baby, it's not my first rodeo

The Bunny and I have moved some ten times or more since the beginning of our relationship. We are about to start the selling process for the second home we've owned together, and it is much more difficult this time around. For one, we live in the historic part of the city, which, like many other towns, means the half-dangerous/half-brilliant neighborhoods where home buying can be like a real estate lottery. Will your property value soar or sink? Due to this bitch ass economy and several foreclosures in this area that are now inhabited by less-than-enthusiastic landscapers with unsavory and questionable social practices, we now own a home that is worth several bucks less than our investment. Dammit. Then again, we are also trying to break the lingering love affair we have with these walls. It isn't as easy as I thought I would be.

Still, we are asking what we feel is a fair price for the property--especially considering all of the upgrades and improvements we've completed to no monetary gain on our behalf--so we might get lucky. That is, if you can call spending countless hours of work/cash renovating a home only to resell it at the expense of your own account "lucky," then we are goddamn leprachauns. The reason for selling now is to bypass our fears that we might still own this home a year from now when we are actually leaving town. I can't even allow my already anxiety-ridden body to imagine the possibility.

With the Bunny's new late night work schedule, I find myself doing the most ridiculous and OCD tasks at close to midnight. I had the TV semi-muted on HGTV where some "Real Estate Expert" was telling a couple to stop thinking their house was better than everyone else's house if they truly wanted to sell it. Their townhouse in D.C. was on the market for $899,000. Granted, this is no D.C., but our house is a nice size with a lovely pool, and we are merely asking pennies compared to their pushing-a-million price. It seems so preposterous that this type of property chasm could exist only a few state lines apart. Sometimes I'm a naive little wifey.

Spurred on by the caustic remarks of said Real Estate Expert, I started to take an objective eye to my home. Yeah, there's probably a bit too much shit crowded on the hutch my mother gave me, which now sets in our beloved dining room. Remove the iconic photo of me kissing the Bunny's cheek--a B&W close-up I took early on in our marriage--and now there is no evidence of our existence in that room. Check. No one wants to see the affection that moved between you and your spouse in the home where they might possibly commit their own acts of affection/sex/love/fighting/making-up.

I toyed briefly with the idea that I might need to hide the vegetarian cookbooks, as the Real Estate Expert says, "It's hard to hear but true: Hide depictions of extreme personal preferences, including wedding photos that might betray a particular religion or spirituality or especially if you are living in a committed homosexual or bisexual relationship. No one needs to know your politics either, or if you have multiple degrees. It gives some people a negative impression of your home." Does a proclivity towards eating vegetables over flesh constitute an "extreme personal preference" in 2009??? Maybe in West Tennessee it does. Really, I pondered this a long time.

I took all of the lovely artifacts from loved ones that collaged our fridge and gently placed them in a box. That was maybe the hardest part: I don't now when I'll see them again. I can't have potential buyers reading our pro-gay marriage sentiments or understanding our position on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, or viewing the gratuitous vagina on a postcard from Key West courtesy of AY-D. No, that just wouldn't be appropriate.

It feels almost sacreligious to stuff old photographs of my grandmother when she was a raving beauty deep into the confines of a drawer. In order to better display our refinished and expansive hardwood floors, I had to gain the disdain of my dogs, who balked at my removal of their favorite living room rug. Believe me, this is no easy process. We've loved living here, but the time to move on is now. I can't delay the inevitable. Why keep living here for months on end knowing this place will, eventually, belong to someone else's refrigerator preachings, kissy face photographs, and old, creaky dog joints?

Run the Numbers

My mother had me when she was 23 years old. I remember the night she turned 30, and though I know I was only 7, it seemed like I was much, much older. I was lying on the living room rug on my stomach while Dances With Wolves played on our tiny wood-panel TV, and she emerged from behind her bedroom door. Always extremely slender with long red hair and bright green eyes, she generally looked prettier to me than everyone else's mom. I guess it was the crisis of turning 30 because she had put her hair up into a ponytail. She looked at me and said in a wavering voice, "Oh, I guess I'm too old to wear my hair this way now." For whatever reason, I've never forgotten her fallen face that night, though she has since told me that her 30s were the height of her life.

I still think about that moment. I am only three years away from 30, and though I know it is annoying to talk about it to people that will inevitably say, "You're still young," I've had a delicious time finding things that make me feel young still.

I had coffee with my friend/son Louis the other day, and I was telling him about this box the Bunny and I found in the basement. It was labeled "Teenage Years," and I'd yet to open it since my mother carted it from her house to mine. Spilling out everywhere were the stacks upon mounds of pen pal letters, love letters, school notes, photographs, snippets of paper memos and receipts that were supposed to mean something but whose significance I could no longer recall. I guess the most complex part was trying to reconcile the photographs of me as a middle to high school aged girl with the woman I've become.

I did not take after my mother's slender frame. From an early age, I had hips and breasts spilling off of my short body in the fashion of my father's side of the family, though I did not inherit their long legs. I always felt very uncomfortable with my girl's mind in a woman's shape. I suppose that is adolescence for everyone, right? My lazy left eye'd smile from before I wore contacts/glasses coupled with my naturally wavy hair in a humid, Southern climate and my proclivity for loud and vintage clothes all stared back at me from these old photos. Despite this appearance, I never felt like I was ugly. I was very confident as a young girl, and I guess this is the reason that, though I was never promiscuous, I always kept a lot of suitors. The girl I found in that box was my hero, I swear it. She wasn't hot. She wasn't even cute, really, but she acted like she deserved the world. She expected nothing less. I was at ease, for the most part, with my awkwardness, though I never stopped hoping to outgrow my curves.

My slender mother is still tiny. I remember a day in high school when she came home from shopping and getting gas. She was wearing a short denim skirt, though my mom generally dressed pretty prudish. She said, "Oh, these boys honked at me from the bypass while I was pumping my gas. I think they thought I was younger. Oh well." She turned to the sink, and I swear I saw her grin a bit. She was nearly 40 then, but her legs were slender and tan and her waist was tiny. I'm certain those boys thought she was no older than 20.

My mother turns 50 in November. Sometimes I watch her standing, again, by the sink in my parents' kitchen. When I was a religious girl, I used to beg God to make my body like her's--clean lined, straight hipped, small breasted, and muscular, but now I like my jiggly breasts. I'm at peace with my parentheses hips, and, I suppose, there's no point in wishing for something so shallow anyways, right? I'd say I'm at least 75% heterosexual, as there is nothing finer than the semi-dirty and rough smell of a man, but the quarter me that finds women attractive is drawn to the drippig curves of an all girl figure. I guess that makes me roughly a 2 on the Kinsey scale.

It has taken a few decades, but I've finally learned how to navigate these wiles through plenty of spaces. I teach a poem every semester by Eavan Boland called "Anorexic." The extended Adam/Eve metaphor is quite clever, though the speaker's desire to return to a time "before the fall"--to retreat and become as small as a rib--is very disturbing. I suppose this is the best part of getting older: I can no longer understand these wishes for diminution.

Atticus Finch Would Say Never Judge a Stripper Until You've Danced in Her Shoes

I'd say it's pretty much a comedy troupe performance around the clock at our house. After we found our burglurer's hat in our side yard, the Bunny and I started wearing it around and misappropriating said thug's identity. I knocked on the back kitchen door, and the Bunny said, "Who's there?" With the hat cocked sideways a-top my head in the style of dear thief, I responded, "It's me, Anthony, and I'm gonna steal yo' shit." The cap smelled like old vinegar and raw booty, but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make for the sake of humor.

I made up a giant pan of flourless peanut butter cookies last night--2 cups crunchy or creamy peanut butter, one cup sugar, one cup brown sugar, dash of vanilla, and two eggs mixed together, dropped by rounded mini-scoops, and baked at 350 on an ungreased sheet for 8 minutes--and we settled down in front of the Game Show Network. Not only did GSN crack us up with their obviosly senior citizen geared commercials, Family Feud asked, "Name something a stripper doesn't want to break during her performance."

I shouted automatically at the screen, "Her bra! Her bra!" The Bunny said, "You dumbass. She's a STRIPPER. Why would she care if her bra breaks?"

The keen, elderly African American grandmother on the challenging team said, "She don't want to break her leg." Her sisters/nieces/daughters agreed, "She sure don't, Gran!" Believe it or not, a large percentage of individuals were concerned about a stripper breaking her leg during the performance, and the Phillips stayed alive for the challenge. The top survey answer, however, was G-string. I found that to be quite shocking. I wouldn't think too many strippers would be concerned about the showing of their hoo-ha, but I've never been on that neon stage--never danced on those acrylic heels--so it wouldn't be right for me to judge.

But I know I've got one thing I've got to do--ramble on.

In my hometown, there were two kinds of families: those who listen to Country music and those who listen to Classic Rock. My family was all working-class factory people, so we never strayed from the local rock station. Everything from the quintessential Southern "coded" music like Lynyrd Skynyrd, to guitar gods Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, to the music I still love like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin all comprise my childhood memories.

Growing up, I don't remember spending a lot of time with my father, as his primary and singular responsibility was to "deposit a check" at the end of every work week. The few encounters we had with one another were often played against a classic soundtrack that would make one think I hit my heyday in the 70s, rather than the
90s. We used to ride around in his old Toyota truck, the type with the huge fog lights mounted on top of a silver bar and riding atop monster truck-sized tires. He would quiz me, "Alright, now this is the man that plays his guitar left-handed and upside down. Name that artist." Soon after "Mama" and "Dada," I'm pretty sure I learned "Jimi."

As I got older, my father would invite me to listen to records with him on the old stereo in their bedroom. He would pull out Heart albums and express his undying desire for pre-80s Nancy and Ann Wilson. His passion for Fleetwood Mac extended to encompass his worship of Stevie Nicks. The first time I saw that ubiquitous Springsteen's-ass-amidst-patriotic-backdrop album cover was when I was still wearing a Muppet Babies nightgown. That memory is as fresh for me as my fifth birthday party. When we moved to the country and left behind our child-friendly neighborhood in town, my 8-year-old self created my own "radio station," complete with all of the classic hits I'd dubbed from my dad's records onto tape. I mimicked the "SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY" booming voices of the local deejays and used my alarm clock to create wacky radio-esque sound bytes. I entered middle school as an awkward girl who worshipped The Moody Blues and could sing Petty/Nicks's duet "Stop Dragging My Heart Around" word for word.

These songs are all the more powerful to me in the summertime when I tend to ride windows-down across my hot little town. I returned from a trip to the local dollar store yesterday with Zeppelin's "Ramble On" playing on that same classic rock station from my childhood:

"It's time I was on my way.
Thanks to you, I'm much obliged
For such a pleasant stay."

I tried to tell my mother over birthday dinner yesterday that the job hunt would be starting this Fall, likely taking us up and out of here, but she just made some funny noise and kept talking about my sister's grades. I suppose I could blame our wanderlust on Zeppelin--after all, Mom and Dad gave me this legacy--but it just isn't an easy conversation either way. While the Bunny and I sit up late at night under the moon lingering over our backyard, the air quiet for once in the middle of our noisy hood, and discuss mountain homes and endless prairie sunsets, Mom has hope that we'll keep our feet planted right in this space. She is likely in her own backyard, Power 92 playing the same twenty rock songs on loop, and imagining her life after grandchildren, which are all the more distant now in the wake of our steel-pact to take our chance for a fresh start. Really, a start at all, as the Bunny and I feel we've just been biding our time here all these years.

In a way, our recent break-in was a blessing, as it has given me the necessary catalyst to make a change. I've broken up with the love affair that is my home here. When we do move, I'll lament the end of our time together, housey and me, but I'll swing with fanfare into the passenger seat of the moving van my Bunny will navigate across roads far away--beyond, even, the reach of West Tennessee's most powerful classic rock station--determined to take my leave.

Down in space, it's always 1982

I was born July 9, 1982, which means that I am 27 today. I share my birthday with Courtney Love, Fred Savage, John Tesh, O.J. Simpson, and Tom Hanks. When I was younger, I used to think a lot about my astrological sign, Cancer, and how these people were somehow tied to me. I don't really do that anymore. Here's the highlights of 1982:

1. January 13th--a plane crash claims 78 lives and 3 people died when a train derailed. Both events happened in D.C. Now, you're saying, "Bette, I thought there was no tragedy on your birthday?" Unfortunately, I am obsessed with major disasters. It is not that I wish for them to happen, so much as I can't get myself away from being dazzled by the aftermath. I have always thought I would die in a plane crash. Woohoo, happy birthday to me!

2. Remember when plain ol' Bette used to be BetteDavisLies? That harkens back to the album of the year for 1982: Kim Carnes's Bette Davis Eyes. See, everything has a reason under the sun.

3. At the 1982 Academy Awards, Chariots of Fire won best picture. I've never seen the movie, but I know it is recorded on VHS somewhere at my parents' house from the days when my Dad would pop a tape into the VCR and record everything that came on HBO.

4. Reagan was president and the Falklands War was in the news, but, of course, I don't remember any of this due to the fact that I was a mere infant, though I did think Reagan looked a lot like my father's father, who was a WWII vet and the autobody teacher at our local high school. He died when I was six, but I'm pretty sure he was the reason my Dad was so old school masculine back in the day. I connect Reagan-era politics/ideology with my family's personal gendered family norms.

5. June 21-- Princess Di gives birth to Prince William. My mother says she hoped upon hoped that we would share the same birthday since I was due way before the 9th, but I had to be pulled forcibly from the warm confines of her body. In X-rays, it is clear that my left scapula is several inches lower than my right. When mom first found out, she cried, saying between sobs, "I....just....knew....they....wrenched...
you....outta...me...TOO HARD!" She was more disappointed that Prince William and I didn't get to share the same day than she was about the long ass labor I put her through, and she did it completely drug free. Yay, mom.

6. July 9-- I was born, and a Pan Am flight crashed in Kenner, Louisiana killing all 146 on board and 8 on the ground. When first I learned this, I took it as a sign to corroborate my belief that I will die in a plane crash. I told you I was seriously superstitious.

7. October 1--Sony releases the first CD player, though I'm sure it costs a million dollars. Remember the yuppie couple--Todd and Margot?--in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation? When I think about CD players before the 90s, I always think about how Clark W. Griswold destroys said player.

8. November 30--the best-selling album of all time is released: Michael Jackson's Thriller. I had a major crush on both Michael Jackson and Prince when I was a girl. Really, I just liked exotic/dark-skinned men. My father was pretty racist, or at least concerned about what everyone would say in our small, Southern town if his daughter dated black boys. I was so scared of his wrath, that I had to keep my affection for both pop icons a secret. In fact, I didn't even tell my parents about my obsession with Oates of Hall and Oates fame because he was kind of black. I think it only made me long for these taboo men more.

9. December 26--Time magazine's Man of the Year award goes to its first non-human--a computer. I didn't realized inanimate objects were sexed in the English language.

10. A brief but severe recession occurred during the year 1982--I think some of this evidence is backed-up by my previous post with photos from early-1983. I guess this is the reason I'm not down on the economy because I know we'll all be okay, and I'm a glass half full kind of girl anyways.

Tonight, I'm off to see Wicked at the Orpheum in Memphis, and I'm eating my favorite, Indian food, with some of the best people I know. Tomorrow night, the Bunny is making me some homemade macaroni and cheese, and we are going to see Bruno. The best things in life are semi-cheap, generally edible, and always full of spectacle.

Our People Don't Take Kindly to Charity

I've been having the kind of week where extremely old memories come back to me in the middle of the most mundane moments. I'm rereading Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina for the FOURTH TIME before setting out on my next chapter, which includes a discussion of the work and an original interview I did with Allison a few months ago. No other book reminds me more of my mother, as it follows the childhood perils of Bone--a victim of sexual abuse, labeled as "trash" and "bastard child," growing up poor and hungry in South Carolina.

Where I just stopped reading, Bone has been caught stealing tootsie rolls from the drug store. Oddly enough, I have to go to court tomorrow to testify against the man/boy that stole from us. It reminded me of the one time I stole a piece of gum at the tiny market in my hometown. I don't know my age, but I must have been a toddler because I remember being nearly eye level with the bottom rung of the candy display. We weren't poor, per se, but we did have a rough couple of months before my sister was born when my father got laid off from his factory. Mom was working around the clock at Wal-Mart, and my father--never one to take charity--refused unemployment benefits. Instead, he left every morning and stood in line to procure whatever day labor was available.

On the days he didn't find work, he would stay home with me. Always good with his hands--though he was a big, scary Southern daddy, he had delicate hands like my Bunny--he would make silly hats for me out of construction paper. Depending on the season/holiday, he would create a theme, prop me up on the appropriate "backdrop," sometimes my mother's handmade afghan or the bedspread on their water bed, and he would document them in photos:


You can tell he was off work for several months because of the changing hat themes.

All of this--Allison's words, my petty theft, our impending court case, and my father's pictures--reminded me of my mother's admonishments to me from early, early childhood: never take anything that doesn't belong to you. Her case-in-point comes from her personal tale of delinquency. Nevermind uncomfortable struggle, she was dirt ass poor. She says their house always smelt like piss, and it made her embarrassed to ever have anyone over for a visit. To this day, she cleans like a mad woman. One day, when she was a young child, Mom went to the drugstore and stole a giant candy bar. Eagerly unwrapping the foil, she took one bite and felt movement in her mouth. The entire bar was covered in ants. She took this as a sign of her sin, and she never, ever stole again.

Technically, the Fifth of July

We have the kind of relationship with our neighbors that affords us the ability to freely traverse the lush green valley between our lawns and vice versa. Just the other day, I left an extra tomato plant from our garden on our neighbor's porch with instructions for care. In return, he gave me the secrets to one of his prized cheesecake recipes. Whenever some crazy crime goes down on our block, we commiserate over midnight chats between the shadows of our homes and ring one another's doorbells for spices/tools/advice/trash talk. Really, it's the kind of thing I love most about living in a traditional neighborhood.

This neighbor, Mr. J, is a cancer survivor in his mid-50s. His wife of 30+ years is a quiet lady who wears denim Looney Tunes shirts buttoned to the top and incessantly carries around a small fluffy dog as if it were a mink muffler. Mr. J is quite liberal for a man his age born and raised in the South. He speaks in the sort of genteel Southern tone that requires the long i to sound like a long o. (For months we thought our other neighbor, Mr. Bible, was actually named "Mr. Bobble" due to Mr. J's unique pronunciation.) Though he was skeptical of our commitment to lawn care when we first moved into the house next door, he soon trusted in our ability to uphold his high standard of home maintenance. In fact, I'd say we one-upped up him.

One of our first experiences as neighbors happened within weeks of our arrival in the neighborhood. The Bunny and I would stay up until nearly sun-up in an attempt to finish six months of renovations in a month's time. After midnight, we would take breaks on the front steps, sipping cold beers and fending off the terrible heat wave of 2007. (Remember how the farmer's crops would barely grow that year?) One night, we heard a rustle to our right, and Mr. J emerged, seemingly bald head first, from the dark confines of his covered stoop. He remarked that he is a "night owl," and we put an already-sweating bottle into his fist as he settled in on the second step from the top. With our gigantic hollies guarding us from street view, the Bunny, Mr. J, and I talked with the occasional bumping bass music from passing cars and crickets as our soundtrack.

That night, Mr. J talked about the first place he and his wife rented together. It was the home of a middle-aged, never-been-married woman who found out she had terminal cancer. She meticulously covered every inch of her kitchen in heavy mil plastic, and shot herself in the head. As Mr. J put it, "she didn't want to leave a mess in the kitchen she loved." This tale was followed by the quiet admittance that he once had an affair. As we had only known him a few weeks, I didn't inquire into the details, and I'm certain we changed the subject rather fast. It is likely we discussed plans to merge our side yards into one joint walkway or made plans to cut back our hideous boxwoods. His admittance, however, hung heavy in the air, and neither the Bunny nor I have ever forgotten it.

It seemed like Mr. J just wanted someone to listen. I suppose we provided that opportunity. Then again, Mr. J did have us "listen" in on the fact that his cousin, who works at a busy music store in Memphis, had helped a local legendary musician find the "old school porn with the real bushy ladies" one day at work a few months ago, but that is another story for another night.

When the tornado sirens went off an hour ago, I nudged the Bunny to attention and flipped on the Weather Channel to discover a tornado warning for our county. I suppose we are all programmed to respond in these parts, but I deftly slid on the nearest discarded clothes and fumbled down the stairs with the still-sleeping Sebastian slung against my hip like a toddler. More curious than scared, the Bunny and I went outside to stare at the sky and "feel our way around" this weather. As if on cue, Mr. J emerged nearly simultaneously from his house followed closely by Mrs. J in a post-Mennonite layer of nighttime wear and with dog-muff intact.

It wasn't until I noticed their stares until I realized I was wearing booty shorts hitched nearly to my crotch accompanied by a bra-less tank and bright maroon tennis shoes. The Bunny donned his redneck tongue-in-cheek shirt that I brought for him last Fall: "Overworked and Underfucked" fell loosely above his britches.

Here we were, the four of us representing two generations of marital manifestation, linked by a common lawn, and standing under the same eerily moving sky lit with heat lightning and last minute contraband firecrackers. When the sirens finally faded--the tornado shifting to some other neck of these Tennessee counties--we all said our good nights and entered our respective doors. The Bunny's breathing is rising and falling beside me as I type, but it is likely our night owl neighbor is five yard sticks away from my window in his private office hoping to feel the need for sleep as desperately as I myself want it now.

And you just thought that was all of me

I didn't mean to be so negative last time, but, really, it was everything I was feeling and more. Things just looked so dark from my little black office chair, and the news only got worse with every telephone call and inappropriately serious Facebook message.

But things are back on track. I've finished 1/3 of my dissertation since the beginning of summer. I plan to have 2/3 finished by the end of August, and I'm on the track to graduate next May. The Bunny and I have been hope, hope, hoping for a mini-bunny, but I certainly can't control what happens in that arena. We change our minds daily about staying in this house, building a fancy garage, and painting our guest room yellow. Then, again, in conversations late at night, we know that a move may be on the horizon. All I can say, is stay tuned, folks. It depends upon the the ol' academic job market, really.

The man-child that tried to steal our stuff--i.e. broke my sense of security, invaded my space, and made me feel like a fool--will be tried in court next Wednesday. I found his hat between the fences where he escaped. He is a juvenile. The really lame part of me wants to bring his hat to him, and the other half of me wants to piss on it. The side of Bette--which my father would call my "damn liberal" side--wants to teach this kid a lesson in....literature. I have this idealistic visioning that the world could be cured with books. Maybe the bad people are only evil because their mommies didn't read to them, or they themselves never found the magic in text with which all of the finest people I know are enraptured. I could haul my teachery cloth bags fulls of literary greatness up to the juvenile detention center and start him on a strict regiment of reading. After all, what will locking him up do anyways? He isn't going to be reformed in a cage. I feel sad for him now, really.

We had a rat living in our backyard. No kidding, the damn thing was munching on the feces left by our dogs before "poop clean-up day." (I only write Truth and Beauty, folks.) One day, I looked from our second floor bedroom window and saw TWO rats lunching together on our back lawn. What got me was how brazen they were--sunning themselves while enjoying their treats. I called the Bunny frantically, and we set up traps that night. The whole ordeal was strangely satisfying and grotesque, as we lobbed peanut butter on inordinately large rodent traps and--this next part is completely true--set up lawn chairs on the patio to watch. One rat hobbled out to the trap nearly immediately, and then he back-stepped and retreated into our shrubs. What a smart little rat. I'm certain he saw us in his peripheral vision.

Do not fret, however, as the mini-possum-esque creatures were found semi-decapitated and curled the next day. This morning, I remarked to the Bunny that he might try putting the traps in our back trash area, as we live close to downtown, and I'm certain the sewers are what has brought them our way. The Bunny fell to the ground in a semi-convulsion, protruded his teeth, and made the classics X across the eyes squinty-face in homage to our dead rodent pets. I giggled and supposed that was a "yes" for my question about the traps.

All in all, we've been trying to avoid the things that bring us down and live each day with "I love you" falling out of our mouths with reckless abandon. On that note--I'm sorry I abandoned you, dear bloggers.