thursday afternoon

It's cold today. It's one of those day-after-a-storm days and the sky is bright blue with a few lovely poofy clouds here and there. There is just the slightest of breezes blowing, but it's a cold one, reminding my fingertips and nose that winter is coming sooner than I'd like.

You know, why doesn't someone make a nose warmer? Not a scarf, because that has to wrap all the way around your head and cover up your mouth to warm your nose. They have ear muffs, why on earth not a nose muff?

I suppose you'd look stupid.

But I digress. Shocker.

I'm sitting at the dining room table with a view of the Western Flutter-Leaf trees (a.k.a. Aspens) in the yard behind my house, fluttering their leaves as they should. They're best this time of year, since there's only 4 of them, and 3 of them are mostly dead. In the summer they're only half-clothed in green leaves, except for the one healthy one, which takes its role of Show-Off Healthy Tree quite seriously. This makes the other ones look absolutely pathetic until fall, when the brilliant one is yellow and losing its leaves and the dead ones just look like over-achiever Leaf Losers. PS. Photo below is so NOT a pic of my neighbor's trees. It's just a gorgeous reminder of why I love fall.


The point (Yes, there is one): It's a gorgeous afternoon and I adore this season. A few days ago I got out of the car and stepped into a gutter full of leaves. I couldn't help it: I ran through them, dragging my feet so it would kick up the leaves even more. I ran back and forth 3 or 4 times, then realized I must have looked fairly ridiculous -- not only because I was a 34-year-old mommy running through the leaves in the gutter, but because I was swinging my purse around while I was at it.

Caution: Leaf-filled gutters may cause rampant leaf-running, unabashed purse waving, and absurdly huge grins.

And then to top it all off, I grabbed a huge handful of leaves, stuffed them in my face and... inhaled. Deeply. Deliciously. Oh, I LOVE the smell of fall leaves!! It was just about the most perfect 8 minutes of my week.

Just thought you'd like to know.

Happy fall. Again.

toothpaste on the mirror

The bathroom: A fine, practical, utilitarian sort of space. Oh I know, some people have a spa for a bathroom with a 10-foot wide, 5-foot deep bathtub and a fireplace with candles all over the place. Some people, I believe, would call their bathroom a sanctuary.

At my house the bathroom is the room an inch larger than a closet that just barely fits the necessities, the end. You walk into the sink, take a step and hit the bathtub, and wedged in between the two is the toilet. Apparently, when my house was being built in the 70s, no one could think of a reason that you'd want to actually like that space, or heaven forbid, move around more than 2 feet.

So I like to honor the builders of the 70s by treating my bathroom just as they intended: get in, get done, get out. Showers? 5 minutes. Tooth brushing? Keep it to the maximum 2 minutes. Hand washing? Just long enough to sing my ABCs.

My children are another story -- particularly the 3 youngest. For them, brushing your teeth is a group activity; in fact, if you send one of them up to get it done without anyone else, they'll stop and tell you they can't...because...well, no one else is in there...

Oh, I'd LOVE to know what goes on when they're all in there. For example, why in the world is there a blob of toothpaste on the wall every morning? The wall. Sure, the sink. They're kids, there's bound to be a little toothpaste in the sink, on the counter, or even the faucet. But what, pray tell, are they doing to get toothpaste on the wall every day?

Or in the evenings, after everyone's gone to bed and I head up to take care of my ablutions and other various bathroom activities, why is it that when I go to use some toilet paper, it's all wet? Not sopping, mind you, just wet enough that when you pull on some, a little bit stays on the roll and there you sit holding a scrap of damp, clinging paper in your fingers.

What could they possibly be doing? There's not really water anywhere else, not on the floor or the sink, or the toilet or walls. It's just there on the toilet paper roll.

Then there are the baths. These, unlike the tooth brushing, are one-man jobbers. The Boy, in true "man-form," prefers the shower, and is in and out in seconds. Just long enough, I believe, to barely wet himself, run a bar of soap up and down his body, rinse, and get out. Seriously. I think it's about a minute.

But the girls all love a bath. And I have no idea how they do it, but there are always, always gallons of water on the floor when they're done. I don't know what they do. Are they laying down and swishing the water back and forth to make great waves plunge out of the tub and all over the floor? If they are, I never hear the wave-making, and even in those moments when I have to run in and get something, I hear nothing. The shower curtain is closed and there is no sound whatsoever, save for perhaps the stray drip from the faucet.

I've decided that maybe they just take the first 3 gallons that come out of the faucet and scoop it onto the floor before they turn off the water, so I'll be none the wiser. Who knows?

All I know is I'd love to be a fly on the wall to see what's really going on in there when I'm not around. Then maybe I could at least protect the toilet paper.

Oh well, we can't know all the mysteries of life, can we?