Eviction Notice

Dear Occupant:
You are hereby being served with an eviction notice. You are no longer welcome in our gas barbeque grill, that which you have been calling home since sometime after Sunday evening as well as some time before then as well. Your nest, a cozy combination of maple tree seeds, leaves and dryer lint, cannot stay in its present location as it is highly flammable and therefore presents a danger to all.

Please vacate the premises immediately. Drastic measures will have to be taken if you do not comply.

Sincerely,
The Management

----------------------------

I was driving home from DJ's daycare when I received the following text message from Steve:
"I have to serve another eviction notice."

When I got in the door, I handed DJ to Steve, grabbed the camera, and we went out to the grill. Steve pointed to the corner in which the nest would be, and slowly opened the grill top. The mouse had abandoned ship but the nest was most certainly there.
Apparently, when Steve had opened the grill top the first time, the mouse was sitting in its nest, and looked up at Steve as if to say, "Whaaaaaat???" That's when I got the text message.

Suddenly Steve says, "Oh! There it is!" Sure enough, the mouse was running along in the top of the grill. That little stinker can jump and it's quick!!! DJ was watching the mouse as well.





I went inside and got the dogs. I picked up Napoleon and showed him the mouse. Instantly, Napoleon's ears perked to attention, and he watched that mouse's movement like a hawk. I put Napoleon down so that I could take DJ from Steve so that Steve could... well... prepare dinner.

Steve had gone to get something with which to catch the mouse, and valiantly attempted to catch the little sucker to take him out into a field somewhere, but the little bugger got away. Unfortunately, Napoleon didn't see the mouse get away to chase it. Then Steve had to eliminate the nest (again). And then run the grill at max heat for 20 minutes to kill off any "mouse" germs (again).

As I had posted earlier in the week, Steve had evicted the mouse (we assume the same one) on Saturday night. We grilled on Sunday, but we didn't grill until tonight (Thursday). So that little mouse was quite industrious in rebuilding its nest!!

Let me toss this out there though, too... On Monday, when I started the dryer for the first of 5 loads of laundry, I heard what sounded like pebbles in the dryer piping. With the mouse having returned to our grill, I can only assume that what I heard was the mouse in the piping...

Fantastic.

So now we have to figure out how to keep the mouse from both our dryer vent AND our grill. We're hoping that if we grill more frequently than twice a week, eventually we'll scare it away. But will that really work?! Guess we'll have to just see.

Ah, country living... it certainly has its adventures!

What's an octagonal sign?

I remember being 15 years and 9 months and sitting in the Department of Motor Vehicles, taking my Learner's Permit test for my driver's license on a computer. The test was 20 questions, and I think you could only miss 2 or something like that and still pass. While taking the test, the person taking the same test next to me turned to me and asked, "What's a red octagonal sign?" My eyes went wide, and there is no way, at that young an age, that I hid the "you've got to be kidding me" look on my face.

I was reminded of this episode on Tuesday on my way to drop off DJ at daycare. I going southbound on Manor Road, approaching the corner of Dulaney Valley and Manor Roads. To be fair, this is a weird intersection. Dulaney Valley Road "T's" off at Manor Road. The northbound direction of Manor Road does NOT have a stop sign. The southbound direction of Manor Road and Dulaney Valley Road both have stop signs. To boot, it's very much common place during the morning rush for people to be driving northbound on Manor Road and not give a turn signal that they are turning onto Dulaney Valley. So you really have to be careful at that intersection!

As I was approaching the intersection, I'm watching the traffic pattern of the opposing cars to see if I have the time to make the right hand turn onto Dulaney Valley before the closest opposing car. At first look, it seems like I'll have the time to come to a stop and make the right hand turn onto Dulaney Valley before the closest oncoming car would get to the intersection. But I still have to slow down and eventually stop. It's a stop sign after all. And that I do.

The van behind me honks at me.

HUH?!

I don't get it. It's a RED OCTAGONAL SIGN. I have to *stop*.

The thing that blows my mind is that this impatient person wasn't the first person to honk at me at that very intersection. It's happened to me on some other occasions, too. On one of those occasions, Steve was in the car with me, and I asked him, "What did I do wrong?!" He agreed with me that he doesn't get it either. I was exercising caution and therefore not endangering anyone at a very weird intersection.

Admittingly, I also gave in to my pregnancy hormonal whims, put down my window, and gave him the one fingered salute all the way down Dulaney Valley Road. From my rear view mirror, the expressive gestures from the van behind me were, admittingly, hilarious.

Although my one fingered salute was not exactly appropriate, my stopping at a red octagonal sign that says STOP on it was. If this guy's behavior is indicative of typical driving habits in my area, then I'm surprised there aren't more wrecks at that intersection. I will continue to STOP, no matter how many people HONK at me. Go honk yourself, you impatient law breakers. ;-)

There's a mouse in the...

...grill?!

When Steve went to prepare the grill for dinner last night, he was surprised to find that he'd left the piece of foil on the grill from the salmon we'd cooked a couple of weeks ago. That part wasn't all that surprising; it was the stuff IN the foil that made Steve pause.

The foil had leaves, grass, and many pieces of dryer lint... and it was all in one huge pile. Steve moved the foil to the side and just as he finished, out jumps a big *fat* mouse, off the grill, onto the deck, and down the deck stairs into the grass.

Good thing I wasn't turning on the grill. I would have taken the cover off, turned on the gas, lit the grill, and never even opened the top to see what was in it. We'd have had blackened mouse for dinner instead of London Broil!

Catch Up Post

It's been a few days since I posted, and I have a few topics that have been on my mind lately, not all of which can/should be posted on a public forum, unfortunately.

1. Spygate

2. Pitchers throwing intentionally at batters

3. The doggies

4. The baby who is kicking me as I write this (thump)

5. The Apple Store

6. House projects and the lack of time to do any of them

7. Airfare



I guess I'll start from the top.

1. Spygate. I read an article about the New England Patriots and their video cheating and such, and the part I found most telling was this:

In Friday's Washington Post, NFL reporter Mark Maske quotes former Giants quarterback Phil Simms contending that stolen signals are no guarantee of victory: "'I've been in games where we knew every signal, every call by the other team, and we still lost,' Simms said by telephone yesterday. 'We [the Giants] had the San Diego Chargers' signals in 1980. We knew every signal. We knew every play. We were calling out what they were going to do: 'Here comes this. Here comes that.' They still scored 44 points.'" After more Simms quotes, the article moved to other matters. Who was on the New York Giants' coaching staff in 1980? Bill Belichick and Ernie Adams. (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/080517&sportCat=nfl)

Goes to show that a) even with all the knowledge in the world, true athleticism and human creativity cannot be shut down and b) Mr. Belichick needs to go to cheaters rehab.


2. Steve and I were watching the Orioles-Yankees game on Tuesday night. It was a 12-2 blow out by the Orioles. The starting pitcher, Daniel Cabrera, hit Derek Jeter on the back of the hand with a pitch. OUCH. Jeter was a hurtin' puppy but thankfully got away with no broken bones. Cabrera was visibly upset by this. He was hanging his head in remorse and was not making any scene of it.

I can't remember how many innings later, Orioles batter Luke Scott (O's fans have been calling him Luke Scottwalker) was standing in the batters box. He took one pitch very inside and then took the next pitch to his head. Luckily, Luke Scott got out of the way in time. Before Luke Scott even recovered from the flinch, the home plate umpire had already ejected the pitcher. Luke Scott yelled at the pitcher to not throw at someone's head and the pitcher yelled back and got all defensive. The benches cleared, including the bullpens. No punches were thrown. The over-the-plate camera showed that the pitcher was missing the plate by a mile as Scott was not crowding the plate.

The pitcher's reaction shows me he was guilty as "charged" else he would have reacted like Cabrera did. MLB suspended him for 3 games. I was really happy to see that the ump didn't flinch; he saw it for what it was without even an argument.

I was reading Curt Schilling's (Boston Red Sox pitcher) blog (http://38pitches.com/2008/04/18/intent/), and he was saying in one post that anything thrown behind a batter is clearly intentional to hit him or make some kind of a point. And frankly, I think the same applies to throwing at someone's head. I'm sorry, if you've gotten to the Major Leagues, you know how to control and throw a baseball. You may have off days and can't get the ball in the strike zone, but "wild" pitches like that? Sorry, I don't buy it.


3. Oh how I wish Napoleon wasn't regressing but he is. He's forgotten his crate training and peeing in the crate again during the day. Totally maddening, and we don't know why he's decided to regress. I guess we're going to have to start taking him to daycare again, else I'm going to have to start getting up at 5am and give him a structured walk him for an hour to get him REALLY tired. I don't have the energy for either scenario right now, though....

Napoleon has also been keeping me up at night with his whining. He doesn't want to be in the crate because he wants to be in the bed with us. Fine. IO goes in the crate, Napoleon comes to bed. Except that when Steve finally settles in for the night, Napoleon all of a sudden wants to go back and be with IO. So then Steve has to get out of bed and put Napoleon in the crate. Needless to say, I don't get it.


4. The new baby. I think this baby will be as active/busy as DJ is. This baby is very active in utero, at least I can feel alot. Yikes! It's almost consistent, too. If I settle down for the evening on the couch or sit at my desk at work a particular way, the baby starts thumping me. I feel you in there!!


5. The Apple Store. My laptop has been giving me fits the last number of months. It's been crashing unexpectedly, but most often while playing World of Warcraft. Yesterday, it started shutting off all by itself while I was ripping CDs. Unlike WoW, that's not video intensive. And it was doing it very consistently.

So I made an appointment at the Apple Store, took it in, and of course, I couldn't get it to crash while ripping a CD. Of course. The tech ran some diagnostics, which of course it passed, and then I said, "Let me login to WoW and get myself to a spot that the laptop hates." Sure enough, I hearth into Shattrath and wham-o. The screen goes black and the machine shuts off. The tech was impressed. He's ordering me a new motherboard which, even though it's technically a separate component, will have a new video card, too, because it's soldered onto the motherboard. I should be getting that back on Saturday.

Tonight, though, we're going to get my parents a new computer. We're going to take them to the Apple Store and look at various models and hopefully they can decide what they want. I've been promising them this for months and it's about time I just do it. So voila... we're doing it.


6. In reading Dave's blog, he's doing all these house projects to his new place and it's making me feel lazy. I have to keep reminding myself that I'm tired, I have a toddler, and I don't have the time to do anything. But I want to work on the beds outside! They need attention! Or they need a very strong plant killer. ::sigh:: I also want to clean up the basement, and organize the house some more as we still have boxes that we haven't unpacked since we moved in nearly 2 years ago.... yikes.


7. My folks called to tell me that they'll probably drive down with us to the beach this year because airfare is ridiculous. And to the airport closest to the beach, it is... $600/person is outrageous. We'd do better renting a Suburban and driving than dealing with that! But i looked on Southwest.com, and wow... they have half decent prices, like $85/person one way for a senior citizen. That seems reasonable!!! Except that it's flying into a city that's 2 hours away. Now my brother is flying there, too, renting a van and driving, so... if they don't really want to drive the 8 hours with us, they could make the trip in half the time flying and driving with my brother. That'll be a discussion over dinner tonight.

I was listening to the radio this morning and they were saying that airfares are going up because of fuel costs. Southwest may have raised their fares, but they aren't ridiculous like USAir, who will be charging $15 per bag. Want to charge me for using the bathroom, too? Sure, I'll leave the quarter on the tank.... Airlines = FAIL.

Parenting musings due to McDonogh incident

Be forewarned: This isn't a feel-good-happy blog posting. I'm not going to be able to address all of the issues embedded in this incident. There are race, class, and other social issues involved here that I could write a book. Instead, I'm writing this because I want to address the topic that is closer to me right now: parenting.

On Thursday, both the Baltimore Sun and the Baltimore Examiner broke a story about a Sophomore at McDonogh having bludgeoned his mother and attempted to do the same to his father.

This hit home in 2 ways: 1. The less "deep" way, a McDonogh student did this. 2. How could a child do that to their parent?!

A few months ago, another high school boy killed his entire family while they were sleeping. Again, at the time, I wondered, what would drive a kid to do that? Like the McDonogh kid, everyone said this kid seemed normal, well mannered, good grades...nothing to indicate some kind of psychosis. That incident hit home because it was a kid living in the general vacinity and it was a kid/family situation, but not nearly as closely as this incident.

Like the other incident, this incident makes you ask, why? What would drive a kid to snap like that? And then it makes you look into yourself and pray, please may I not do to my kid whatever the others did to make their kids snap. And, what can I do to help my child control their impulses? But I kept going with this line of thinking... am I really going to do something that's going to make DJ and/or his unborn sibling crack? I mean, what could I do to cause that?! I can't even fathom what I might do... !!

I've spent the last few days thinking about this... I mean, sure, every teenager, myself included, all wants to "kill" their parents, but at no point, not ever, ever, ever do you ever consider the real act. Never even crosses your mind. It's just all part of the asserting your independence and figuring out who you are phase (though you do that again in your mid-20s), but again, it's just frustration with both the parent and the teenager trying to figure out safe boundaries. It's not revert-to-instinct-and-kill anger.

Being a McDonogh grad, I still have connections into the school. In the case of this particular incident, I didn't go searching for details, but the details came to me (maybe God knew I needed the closure...?). The kid had an above 4.0 GPA, so clearly he was an honors/AP student who could most certainly handle the workload McDonogh was throwing at him. Apparently, he'd gotten an average grade on a test, and was afraid to tell his parents.

Excuse me?

You have an above perfect GPA and you're afraid to tell your parents that you got an average grade, not failing, but *average*. Wave the red flag and stop that car!! There's something very, very wrong there.

Ok, I've been afraid to tell my parents about a bad grade, so I can say I can empathize with the feeling. But I certainly had nowhere near this kid's GPA; I was a full GPA point below him! He's a National Honor Society first-rounder and probably future Ivy League-r, and I... yeah... National Honor Society never saw my name on their ballot and the Ivy Leagues rejected me, twice. So the kid had an off day. Don't we all have off days?! Isn't that all part of learning and maturing, is learning how to deal with yourself when you have off days (or streaks) so you can turn it around to get the desired results the next time?

I'm not the world's perfect parent; never will be. But common sense tells me that this was an extreme case of "push".

Yes, McDonogh is a top area college preparatory school with pressure of its own to get its students into the top colleges of the country. But during my time at McDonogh, I never felt like the curriculum, the teachers, or the environment were one of extreme "push". Sure, they'd push you to perform your best, but nothing above and beyond what was reasonable. They were actually a pretty good judge of what you could do. This is not to say there wasn't pressure; but the pressure I felt was from my way-too-smart-for-their-0wn-good classmates. A sizeable chunk of my classmates went to some of the best schools in the country. And even then, I didn't always feel the pressure from them. The existence of that type of pressure is not the school's fault. If anything, that's healthy pressure. And since graduation, there hasn't been THAT much turnover that would change that atmosphere. At least not that I can tell, but I'm an outsider now so I couldn't know that for sure.

Therefore, that leaves the pressure having come from home. Yikes. That's some serious "push". Why? And to what end? The reality is that with 1 average grade, his final grade would be completely unaffected, and thus his overall GPA would be also unaffected. So his chances to get into college are fine. The question to ask is if this is a pattern, what's wrong? Is the class just not his forte? Are there too many extracurriculars going on? Is it that he and the teacher aren't meshing?

I know we don't have the whole picture and a lot of those questions are entirely hypothetical based on the very little information I have. And we'll never get the whole story, if the family even knows... But it makes me feel better to think this is the scenario... to think like this it gives me hope that I may have the ability to control this type of outcome and that this won't happen to my family.

But the lesson here is for me, as a future parent of teenagers, is moderation! And learn my children's limits! Make my expectations clear, but also have compassion and be willing to teach the "off day" lesson. And if it's a pattern, use my analyst and troubleshooting skills and figure out what's going on...

And pray that God can give me the wisdom to raise happy, well adjusted children.

Happy Mothers/Birth Day

As usual, my birthday falls within days of Mother's Day. So celebrating the two together is nothing unusual. :)

Steve gave me the most wonderful gifts this weekend. Between Mother's Day and my birthday, I've been quite spoiled! For Mother's Day, besides a nap in the morning, Steve gave me Rock Band. WOOHOO! I'm also probably the only mother on the planet that got Rock Band as a Mother's Day gift. LOL

Last night, Steve took me out to dinner for my birthday.... Charleston in Harbor East. Oh man is that place fan-tastic. We each had a 5 course meal, though to be fair, each course was appetizer sized. Steve got a wine pairing with each meal of which I took a sip or two of each. There were some wines that by themselves, were difficult to drink. But when we got the meal and tried the wine with it, they were absolutely perfect. Amazing how the wine "changes" based on what you're eating. I'll post the menu later; I forgot it at home. Suffice to say, it was nothing short of WOW, that was AWESOME.

Besides the quality of the food, Charleston prides itself on its service (as well as wine selection). Our initial waiter had the Robert Smith (from The Cure) hairdo that just had to go. He also postured a lot... ok, so he drove me bonkers. He apparently shoved off our table and went to a different one by the end of the evening because we were being attentively waited on by a young lady who had a much more genuine personality than "Robert Smith". Aside from that, though, the experience was truly an experience, and it was really nice to spend some quality time with Steve, even if he was constantly checking his iPhone for signs that his servers had crashed... which they did right around dessert. ::sigh::

Who ate too much grass?

The doggies!

The drama from Wednesday night was entirely due to their eating too many grass clippings. They both had two full meals of their food yesterday and not a morsel was vomited. Apparently, we can't let them out for long periods of time now the day our grass is cut...

Doggy drama

Last night, we let the dogs run around outside in the back yard (4 ft fence FTW!) until they exhausted themselves. About an hour after they came in (and had promptly plopped themselves in the corner of the sofa on their blanket), IO got up off the couch and started to wander. Random wandering makes us nervous, so we asked him to get back on the couch which, like a good dog, he did.

A few minutes later, I got ready to go to bed, and gave Steve a kiss goodnight. I go to give the doggies one last pat on the head when I see that Napoleon has vomited all over his front paw and the blanket (thankfully!) he was laying on. Fantastic.

While Steve goes to wash Napoleon off, I start to clean up the mess. I wasn't finished 2 minutes when IO vomited on the OTHER blanket we have on the couch. Uh-oh.

Clean that up, put both dogs in the crate, and settle down for The Watch. Sure enough, IO vomits again in the crate and once more once out of the crate. Napoleon vomits another time on the kitchen floor (Steve saw that one coming and was rewarded with relatively easy cleanup), and one more vomit incident from IO (who eats a lot more grass than Napoleon does).

Now I'm starting to wonder.

I saw an awful lot of grass in the first "rounds" of vomit from both dogs. Grass tends to make dogs vomit. But you know, we also just opened new batches of food for them. It's the exact same food they had previously, just a new bag. But being that I had read an article about the brand of dog food we feed the doggies supposedly being the cause for lots of dogs vomiting only just a few weeks back on the ultra-paranoid italian greyhound list that I read, I am starting to wonder. Honestly, I wasn't convinced from reading that article that the food is to blame here. Seemed like a lot of coincindences, but what do I know? Link is here; draw your own conclusions. http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2008/04/pet_food_recalls93.html

Meanwhile, I kept thinking. We'd fed it to them yesterday morning, and we had no doggy vomit in the crate 11 hours later. So is it really the food or is it the fact that Brian had just cut our grass today and the dogs were feasting on the clippings?? As of right now, the jury is still out. We fed them this morning (they were famished!), and Steve hasn't let me know yet if the doggies are ok upon arriving home.

Also for the first time in years, we let the doggies sleep in separate crates. I think they were so tired from being outside and from all the vomiting that IO was grateful for the alone time (he really isn't a fan of his noisy roommate when the roommate is being noisy), and Napoleon was just d-o-n-e and didn't argue with the arrangements. In fact, they each went into a separate crate on their own accord, so who knows??

Mrs. Cardinal is gone. :-(

On Sunday, when I got back from the autocross, Mrs. Cardinal was sitting on her egg. When I got home Monday afternoon, she wasn't in her nest. I don't know what prompted me, but I decided to look for the egg. It was gone. :-( It's been two days now, and we've not seen or heard her. The nest itself looks intact i.e. no fowl (ha ha) play, but clearly something happened. What could have gotten the egg? Did Mrs. Cardinal leave because the egg was gone or did something happen to her, too? I guess we'll never know.

Either way, I'm bummed. I was really looking forward to watching this all develop.

WDCR Autocross Championship #2

Yesterday was our second championship autocross event at FedEx Field. The email list was flooded with posts about not washing your car and everyone must bring rain gear to try and appease the rain gods. We did not want another rain event!

Everyone must have headed the call because it turned out to be a *gorgeous* 70 degree sunny day. It was fantastic outside.

Steve left at noon to go down to the event (in hopes of getting a course walk), and I stayed with DJ until my parents arrived around 1pm, knowing that I would not get a course walk. On his way down, Steve called me to tell me that the Check Engine light on my WRX wagon turned on. ARG. Who knows what that means. It could be anything from a oxygen sense to a turbo going up. I'll have to find out who can read the code...

Meanwhile, my drive down was uneventful. Once I arrived, Carrie and Mike paid us for what is no longer our CRX, and then I turned around and paid John N. for the miata trunk lid we were taking home in the wagon.

The event was running smoothly, and we were done 6th heat runs by 5:15. For not having had a course walk, Steve ran great, I think. He's disappointed that he coned his fast run, but it wouldn't have helped him in our class standings, just in overall PAX placement. He even spun his 3rd run... woah, wait, he NEVER spins the car! That's my job!

As for my runs, well, my first run was going to be a throw-away since I didn't have a course walk. My second run was clean, so I pushed a little harder on my 3rd run and coned. I also realized on my third run that I'm driving scared... can't figure out why. My fourth run, I found a little bit of a spine and drove better, but not well enough to place better than 8th. At least I wasn't last in the class. And I think that's what's going on... I'm scared to toss the car. I'm scared the car won't stop (since it doesn't have anti-lock). I'm scared I'm going to do something stupid in it, which is ironic since I could drive the STi and it's got way more power to get me in way more trouble way faster. Then again, I was scared to drive the STi for awhile, too. Afraid I couldn't deal with the power... until I learned how good the brakes REALLY are. I still never mastered that car, but I'm wondering how much the pregnancy is messing with my head when it comes to the Miata.

On our way home, Steve was following me, and he saw, as did I, the blue yaris (?) cut over 3 lanes to exit onto 50 from the Capital Beltway... and he missed my bumper, AFTER I slowed down, by inches. I had the horn laid on from before he even started to cut me off, and all the way across my car's nose. He forced me to downshift from 5th to 2nd... if it wasn't Steve behind me, someone would have rear ended me, and I'm really thankful someone didn't rear end him.

Then, on the Baltimore Beltway, out of nowhere, there's a tire tread in my lane. Now, how is it that I didn't see it coming or at least anticipate it? Because the truck in front of me just ran it over, no swerve, no nothing, so I wasn't given any indication that something was amiss. Talk about autocross-holy-cow-DODGE-THAT! swerve. Steve said I even managed to stay in the lane but if I'd hit it, it would have destroyed my front bumper. Like we need ANOTHER car in the body shop... (the STi is getting both bumpers repainted, the Miata needs to go in next... oy). It was quite the adventure to get home, to say the least.

Cardinal update

Mrs. Cardinal has been dutifully sitting on her nest since at least Wednesday when we first saw her egg. We try not to make sudden movements (though it's not like we can stop DJ) so as not to scare her away. So far, she seems generally unphased by us. I have a picture to share...I'll post it when I get it off the camera.