We’re on a Crazy Train
Driving me insane, I’m going off the rails on a crazy train
The children, apparently, are all off their meds. Unfortunately I am not, and I refuse to look at the calendar to see if it’s been 11 or 12 weeks since I’ve run. I don’t have that many fingers and toes.
As I noted on FB the other day, no one – NO ONE – should be filled with steroids four times in one month. Someone could get hurt, and it won’t be me. This could explain why Chunk ran out the kitchen door the other day and hid under the car. Hubs was at one end of the car fishing for her and I was at the other, with a mop. Instead of running back in the house through the nearby kitchen door, which was hanging wide open, she darted for freedom on the front porch where she played Cat & Mouse with the two of us, slinking behind the fern and then under the bench, back and forth, as we darted to and fro, grabbing and missing. We finally captured her; she struggled but we re-inserted her in the house, only to have her shoot out the back door and into the yard – she was close to speed of light, she was across the patio, down two sets of steps, and in the yard before I could turn around – once again, she was captured and re-inserted in the house. She has pulled the lights off the tree, sat in a branch and broke it and meanwhile I’m considering duct taping myself to a chair. Just need to be sure the Keurig will be within reach.
I fixed the broken branch by using long twist ties to buddy tie it to the branch above. It’s listing to one side but should make it through one last Christmas. I bought the tree while the traitors were still in high school so it’s given its due. When all four kids were younger we got real trees for a series of years. I loved it, but hubs’ eyeballs rolling back in his head every time he entered the room and considered the possibility of the entire house going up in flames from shorted out lights finally wore me down. He should have been looking at the fireplace and rolling his eyeballs since that’s where the lightning finally struck and the fire ensued. And it wasn’t even Christmas.
The last time we got a live tree he came close to entering orbit when he had to try to get it in the house. Granted, it was a bit larger than the door. It didn’t look quite that fat at the tree lot, really, although the kids no longer really fitting in the van could have been interpreted as a clue. I just told them it was actually not illegal to drive with three kids in one front (bucket) seat. I’d already paid for the tree and anyway I think the lady hauling all the kids around the tree lot had quickly been singled out by Tree Lot Dude as a nutjob. Not that my pride was impacted. It was some other woman with a bunch of kids whose names she kept mixing up.
After that, feeling sorry for hubs – it had nothing to do with my pride – I decided that was enough and we’d make do with fake, which he could just slide down the stairs from the attic every year in a nice tidy box. That last year, though, that tree was magnificent. We named it Mothra. Mothra The Christmas Tree. We didn’t realize, when picking it out, that it was too fat to stand alone. It had a hearty lifestyle before it came to live at our place; apparently it was a choice of becoming a Christmas tree or auditioning for Biggest Loser, which would have been going out on a limb, if you ask me. I had to use two 4″ nails (one hammered into the window frame and one into the mantel – neither of which I was ever able to remove. When this family nails something to the wall, it’s freeking NAILED. Hubs hung an 8×10 picture on the wall in one of the traitor’s rooms and when we moved I had to saw the nail off at the wall and he re-plastered it. Sucker. Was. Not. coming out. He’d impaled it in a stud. The wall was coming down before that nail did.) We wrapped a thin rope around the trunk and tied the tree to the nails embedded in the wall/mantel. You mostly couldn’t see the rope. Especially when the lights were off.
HI! I’m back! Had to warm up my 3rd or 4th cup of coffee. I’ve kinda lost count because it’s now about 6:45am and I’ve been up since 2:30am. I hope no one counts the empty Kcups in the trash. I’ve had plenty of time to ruminate about long ago, last year, and last week, and here’s the thing: I don’t think either the tree or the “kids” are going to undergo any changes, and I really think it’s going to get worse. I just don’t know. Maybe the steroids are like a virus and I’ve sneezed some on them?
Last year when Chunk was an even earlier version of Chunklite, since she was still a kitten, I worried she’d try to climb the tree, but she never did. She did daily strip the damn thing completely bare of ornaments as far as she could reach and batted them all about the den, but she didn’t climb it. I found ornaments for weeks. I moved a chair last spring and out rolled one last ornament. Lonely, lost little ornament with its top missing. Sad. This year, one branch down on the first day. I didn’t even bother putting ornaments on the bottom branches. Three different Christmases when my kids were learning to pull up, stand, and walk I put the tree in the playpen. That was uglier than some bottom branches without ornaments. If we have company I’ll quickly move a few.
Last year Murphy ignored the tree pretty much, at least as well as he ignores anything in the house which he doesn’t want to eat or sleep on. This past week he spent two days following me like I had a steak glued to my falling off butt but not looking happy about it, cowering behind the nearest piece of furniture he thought he could fit behind (rather like Mothra The Christmas Tree, he had a hugely optimistic opinion of the smallness of his stature, never realizing that an 18″ trash can did not fully conceal him) and while he cowered he shivered and shook, looking hang-dog at me (boy, they nailed that description of a look) (oh, haha – nailed). I’m not sure, but I think he didn’t like the untree-smelling thing set up in the den. He didn’t seem to want to enter the den and when he did he dashed quickly to the door begging for freedom. It could have been the pet repellent I’ve been spraying indiscriminately all over the tree uselessly, as you’ll note in the photo below, where you just might glimpse Mr. Mo settling in for a long winter’s nap as more of the branches dip closer and closer to the carpeting and ornaments slide slowly downward and the tree reeks of chemicals never before combined. But he’s so damn cute.
Apparently to Mo and Munker consider pet repellent to be as attractive as I thought my mother’s Chanel No.5 was when, in 7th grade, I wore it to school for weeks trying in vain to entice the attention of Kevin, an “older man” in 8th grade. Hey, why would I think she’d mind? She never used it – it just sat there on her dresser, another item to dust. Or so it seemed to me. She’d had it for years and it never got much emptier. Wouldn’t you think she didn’t like it but kept it around so she’d have a purpose in dusting? Which, by the way, I thought a useless and archaic waste of time probably invented by my grandmother on the farm, which was surely dirtier than living in town, especially since it was actually me that had to dust the bottle, giving me ample evidence of her disdain for the item. Yeah, right. Disdain until one day in a freakish accident she somehow discovered the visibly lower level of perfume in the bottle and determined it wasn’t the dog smelling so fine. Lesson learned: don’t use mom’s perfume.
Plus, it didn’t seem to work anyway, Kevin fell madly in love with some idiot girl at his stupid church.
Now, this evening, Mo is curled up under the Christmas tree, looking so cute and sweet and pretty, all white and black and soft against the red plaid tree skirt, while he evilly plots his next tree climbing excursion. Chunker, meanwhile, is sound asleep in my chair and has been pretty much since 3:30am when, after a desperate search throughout the house and realizing she was nowhere to be found, I discovered the little sh*t OUTSIDE on the kitchen deck gazing at me through the window. She’d been outside all night. Her longest previous outdoor excursion was the aforementioned visit to the front porch. AND she has not yet batted one ornament off the tree, which I think is a sick ploy to throw me further off my game. Murphy lovingly and uncoweringly played all over the den last night and then curled up with the B’ster, who spent the night with us, and this morning I heard the hubster upstairs roaming around at 7am, he overslept by two hours and didn’t run this morning.
We’ve got to get back to normal around here. I’m the one who’s crazy and they are making me insane.
