Keeping our heinies happy

Now that our family room renovations are finally complete, we are endeavoring to decorate the room in somewhat of a colonial period manner. The two most important criteria for creating this look are, of course: a) very little furniture, and b) very uncomfortable furniture.


So far we are succeeding spectacularly in both a) and b). Right now the room consists entirely of a few pieces made of the hardest wood one can imagine, unless you count our coats and jackets strewn across them. One of these pieces is a red garden bench, which looked very cute in the antique store but which was never meant for one to actually sit on, being decidedly unfriendly to one's heinie. When we watch TV we sit ramrod straight on this bench, getting up periodically -- like every 10 seconds -- to restore some feeling. 


No one can blame people in colonial times for having uncomfortable furniture, as they had more important things to worry about, such as how not to let their heinies freeze while using the privy in the winter. Plus many of them endeavored to follow the good Puritan standard of discomfort is next to godliness, which no doubt carried over to their choice of furniture.


But one does wish that they would have the foresight to invent sofas, which of course they could not because their doorways were too small to allow a sofa to fit through. Our own home, though it does not quite hark back to colonial days, nevertheless also has small doors and doorways. Colonists would have felt right at home with our doorways:


"Ah, thou hast a goodly doorway here! Mine buxom wife will but feebly fit through it!"


As it is, people have had to invent sofas that resemble what we imagine a sofa would have looked like back then, if they had had them. We have been endeavoring to choose one of these sofas for our family room, although they are called a settle rather than a sofa, because it sounds more authentic and because once you have settled in one you cannot get back out of it.


After painstaking research and deliberations, which involved, at one point, using the eeny-meeny-miny-moe method, we have finally chosen a particular settle and fabric. Well, we have chosen three fabric samples. The final choice will require, of course, further deliberations, consultations with every female I am acquainted with, and perhaps more rounds of eeny-meeny-miny-moe.


My sister has already weighed in on the three samples, giving her opinion that the one labeled Virginia Sampler, which consists of various trees and animals, reminds her of -- and I quote -- "Little Bunny Foo-Foo." Little Bunny Foo-Foo features prominently in a rhyme from my childhood, a rhyme valued chiefly for its ability to annoy adults with its constant repetition. I personally would never have associated the Virginia Sampler fabric with Little Bunny Foo-Foo. Clearly, consultation with others who have a deeper understanding of these things is already paying off.


The Hero, being unacquainted with Little Bunny Foo-Foo, likes all three fabric samples. Actually, he would like any of them. Okay, so he would like me to just choose one already so we can watch more than 10 seconds of TV at a time.

Trick-or-Kit-Kat

This year we took to heart the traditional Halloween motto: Be prepared. It's a good thing, too, because we ended up with a record number of trick-or-treaters: 4.


In preparation, I had bought a bag of candy I personally liked, so that in the likely event we had no trick-or-treaters the candy would not go to waste. It's possible that I was hoping we would have no trick-or treaters, because when the first knock sounded the bag of candy wasn't even open.


Superman knocked rather forcefully, and we went into action. I frantically tried to open the bag of Kit Kats, failed, and threw it to Joe and yelled "Open!" while I lunged for the door.


Joe, mistaking "Open!" for a directive to also open the door, collided with the Kit Kats midair. Luckily it was not a giant bag of Kit Kats, or our Halloween might have been spent at the emergency clinic, where medical personnel would have filled out the following report:


Nature of injury: Bruise to left ear
Cause of injury: Giant heat-seeking Kit Kat missile  


The Kit Kat bag appears to have been sealed by someone with a healthy eating agenda, determined that if people are going to eat this junk they may as well work off some calories while opening the bag. Joe frantically struggled to open it, leaving me to entertain Superman and Spider-Man for several seconds, which consisted alternately of them saying "Trick-or-treat!" and me saying, "Aren't you cute!" and whispering fiercely to Joe, "Is it open yet!"


Joe finally plunged a pair of scissors into the bag, which reluctantly yielded up its contents, and in relief I almost threw all the candy at Superman and Spider-Man.


Superman peered at his take closely, and approved it by saying "Awwright! Kit Kat!" This sounded to Joe like a different expression involving "Kick" and another term for donkey, and he was a bit taken aback at Superman's vocabulary until I set him right. We did not get Spider-Man's assessment, as he was already off to the next house, which fortunately for him was just two Spider-Man steps away.


The next group we almost missed, as we were in the basement having family therapy with our furnace, which periodically refuses to work. But Joe got to the door in time to give some Kit Kats to a fairy and another indeterminate girl character, and that proved to be the end of the Halloween action for us. 


The furnace, likewise, saw no further action. Maybe we should give it some Kit Kats.

Trick-or-treat equal opportunity

It's almost Halloween, and that means many parents are going to be frantically searching last-minute for the perfect costume for their kids, or at least a costume, or at the very least a trash bag, which can be many things with just a little imagination, including a bag of trash.


A co-worker said the kids in her childhood neighborhood started trick-or-treating a whole week early, and went every night through Halloween. This probably came about as a result of the parents realizing they had spent a collective 2,374 hours making their kids' costumes, and by golly the kids were gonna wear those costumes more than one night! This must have seemed like a good idea to everyone except the parent whose kid needed 17 hours to put on the costume.


Another co-worker's daughter wants to be a princess every year, and being equal-opportunity parents who want to free their daughter from demeaning stereotypical roles, last year they encouraged her to be a chicken. (Hey, both boys AND girls can be chickens.) As a result of their encouragement to break out of the princess mold, she has been a princess only one Halloween, although she has also been a cupcake fairy, which the parents consider a close relative to the princess.  


Other parents interested in equal opportunity costumes might choose, say, Bat Girl, or the Grim Reaper. If you have a little girl who just doesn't want to give up her dream of wearing a tiara, maybe you can compromise, and have her be the Chicken Princess. Or -- this just might catch on -- a Trash Bag With Tiara.

Hands off the rubber ducks

This month at work has been a busy one, with new lesson manuals to edit, planning meetings to attend, birthday parties to organize, birthday cake to eat, pink rubber ducks to fight over, etc. Okay, so we didn't actually fight over the pink rubber ducks. But the new management policy regarding pink ducks remains somewhat of a sore spot with employees. We editors feel it most keenly.


Every October the company celebrates Breast Cancer Awareness month with various "pink" fundraising activities, one of which involves several pink rubber ducks floating in a tub of water. You pay a dollar per duck, and each duck has a number on the bottom corresponding to a bag of goodies that you win. Most of the bags have things like candy and Lotto tickets, but some have bigger prizes, except not the bags that I pick.


In the past we were able to keep the pink ducks in our cubicles for the entire day of the fundraiser, which we editors got excited about, because we are all women and the pink ducks are cute and we are highly susceptible to cute. We lined them up on the top edges of our adjoining cubes, arranging them in various cute postures, as much as a stiff rubber animal can be made to assume various cute postures. The ducks made us extremely and ridiculously happy, and of course they did not interfere with our concentration on our work in ANY way ("Do you think my duck would look better facing this way?" "Maybe we should alternate the light and dark pinks").


But for the past couple of years, since some departments including our own moved to a different building, we are no longer able to take the pink ducks with us and keep them in our cubes. "Ducks must remain in the building at all times" is the new motto, lest they not come back and the company must spend approximately 66 cents per duck to replace them. So now we must surrender them immediately, and they are dropped unceremoniously, and unloved, into a bucket to be put into storage until the next fundraiser. Appeals for custody, even temporary, have been denied.


Someday, we vow, we are going to liberate those pink ducks and give them a proper, loving home, which would of course be in our cubes. Until then, we wait and dream of having our pink ducks back, and maybe even dressing them up... 

Cakes 'R Not Us

So the cake decorating class is over, the class that I was hoping would launch me into a new hobby. Mostly it has launched me into debt from having to buy 907 decorating tips and other absolutely necessary, non-food accessories, such as Crisco. 

The class was held in a community college and attracted some attention from passing students, who expressed their amazement that they could be taking cake decorating instead of snoozing through Algebra II, and who enthusiastically volunteered themselves for any task that might involve tasting something we were making.

But although the class has not exactly turned me into Ace of Cakes, I learned a great deal from taking it, such as that I should have taken some other class. It is difficult to know which of us is more relieved that the class is over, me or the instructor, who, if she had been required to evaluate me on my cake decorating skills, would have been forced by circumstances to write I am recommending this student for remedial cake class (but with some other instructor).

Take the rose. To make an icing rose you pipe a base and then, starting at the top, you pipe a series of what looks to me like stand-up collars, and somehow when they all overlap they become a rose. That is, if you are the other students they become a rose. Even the students who had missed half the classes could make a rose. My roses more resembled a joining of Baby Bop's head with the Abominable Lettuce Head Creature.

But for some reason I could make a passable pansy, and to bolster my self-esteem after failing spectacularly at roses I became a pansy-making machine, filling my practice space with pansy after pansy while my classmates created The Eiffel Tower of Roses. The instructor did not encourage me to move on to anything else, obviously relieved that I could at least do something that did not involve stencils and spray icing.

So now I am left with this collection of cake decorating paraphernalia, and no talent. And a half jar of Crisco. At least the Crisco might come in handy this winter should we need an emergency source of fuel.

A decorating challenge

At work are always up for a challenge, as long as it doesn't tax our brains too much, and this month we geared up for one of our most difficult tasks to date: how to simultaneously decorate the office for fall, Halloween, and Breast Cancer Awareness month. The result, we believe, is something the Bride of Frankenstein would be proud of. Of course we strove to maintain the utmost taste in our decorations, which would explain the giant paper eyeball pinned to one of the cubicles.


The entryway is a tasteful blend of a large pink tulle bow, pink plastic jack-o'-lanterns, and hairy paper spiders. Numerous cobwebs are pinned to the cubicle walls, which I personally am not overly fond of because they remind me too much of the state of our house right now, which we had been blaming on the renovation process but which has not improved since that ended.


A few plastic spiders inhabit the fake cobwebs, although our heart really wasn't in the spiders, considering the number of actual spiders and bugs we deal with in our office. If we really wanted to be ghoulish, we could pick up any of the easily available specimens of actual, dead bugs in our office and pin them to the cube walls. But of course we are too tasteful for that. 


We have a library stocked with our educational materials, which mysteriously disappear on a regular basis, and we used the opportunity of decorating to make tasteful reminders for anyone who borrows our materials. A picture of a skull, resting on several books, declares ominously that "This could be you if you do not return what you borrow." The Hero has suggested that, given the number of materials that do not get returned, we keep the skull year-round.


One thing we do not have in our office is a flying monkey. The Hero's office is lucky enough to have a flying monkey, which is catapulted sling-shot style across the room and even makes threatening monkey noises while doing so.


I guess there are always things we can aspire to.

We are definitely DONE with renovations

Our renovations have finally come to an end, which we did not think we would witness in our lifetime, and now we are patiently waiting for the floor to dry so we can put some furniture in the room and actually use it. We are somewhat reluctant to do this, however, as the room has never been so clean and devoid of clutter, and we know that once we allow even one teeny, tiny item to enter the room, it will attract thousands of other items, until soon we will no longer be able to find the room itself. 

To help the floor dry more quickly, we have, at the advice of our contractor, kept the temperature in the house at a steady 800 degrees. It is unclear how much this is helping, as this measure is probably being offset by the buckets of sweat we are producing.

Thankfully the unique chemical smell we have been living with is gradually receding, and we scarcely notice it now until we go out in public, and complete strangers wrinkle their nose in distaste and ask why we smell like lighter fluid. 

But overall we are pleased with the changes, and thankful that everything is done. We also have vowed never to embark on such an endeavor again, but plan to simply sit back, relax, and enjoy our new room...wait...now the freshly painted stairs make the kitchen floor look drab...and the walls, haven't they turned slightly more greenish...?

Note: The Princess is diligently working on posting photos of the new room, which will serve as evidence for posterity that yes, once upon a time the room WAS clean. As this task is a strain on her technical abilities, and as the Hero is currently engaged in studying for a midterm and is unable to offer assistance (defined by the Princess as "do it for me, please"), we appreciate your patience.