Dry spell not an option here

Just when I decided I had nothing to write about this week, a chipmunk got into my basement.

I stood in the doorway of the porch in my housecoat with my coffee cup in hand and scowled at the rain pitching down on my soon-to-be growing too fast lawn.

I still have to install my lawn tractor battery. I am pathologic optimist in my view on life, but you can bet I will forget it’s the positive side that gets connected first when I attach the cables to the battery terminal. 

So there I was leaning back taking it easy watching the sky fall, when I felt a claw-like flit of movement over the top of my foot and up my calf under my housecoat.

I squealed and looked down to see a bug-eyed chipmunk—rabid I think—or clearly terrorized after it realized I was not wearing anything under my housecoat. It leapt over my feet and down the stairs to the basement in a millisecond.

Two cats live here and neither of them saw thing as they slept with their big fat bellies pouring over the side of the chairs in the porch. “You’re both fired!” I scolded. All I got back was the flat stare. 

My basement is not that big, but it is full of stuff that makes great hiding places for a chipmunk.

I must have looked a sight in my morning getup—a modern-day “Ma Kettle” with my hair all askew as I crept around down there peering in boxes and bags full of stored coats and blankets hoping not to be attacked by a small flying ball of rodent fur.

Lucky for me I found a landing net for my big fish story hanging on the basement wall. I could poke at things with it and prevent the little critter from eating off my hand if I found where it was hiding.

But no sooner had I grabbed and held the net up above my head to explore the shelf junk, did the chipmunk explode from between the deep fryer and a fan and straight into the capture zone.

If you think you’ve seen the “Tasmanian Devil” in your two-year old child having a conniption in the cookie aisle at the grocery store when you say “No,” to that snack, you haven’t seen a chipmunk stuck in a landing net. 

It was all I could do to keep the writhing and possessed animal from vaulting out and—to the edges of my imagination—down the front of my housecoat. I raced up the stairs and outside, set the net down and stood far back.

Within a few minutes the landing net had been eaten clear through and the good riddance chipmunk was last seen headed east to the sunflower seed sanctuary.

As for me, I also have another story to write about the groundhog that cornered me in the tool shed that same afternoon. There’s never a dull day around here. 

I miss my eyelashes

My day starts around 5:30 a.m. every morning with the first of three cups of “Caldwell” coffee, a small red-foiled square of “Dove” chocolate (maybe two), while curled up in my reading chair with my self-help books (and I still need A LOT of help!) Oh and a novel—a really, really good novel. “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt. I’m on page 723 and I have only 48 more to go. I don’t want the book to end. 

Many mornings I get carried away with “me” time and then have to rush to get the rest of the things done that I need to do before the workday begins.

I get sucked into the world of reading only to look up at the clock and realize I have less than 20 minutes left in which to eat, get dressed, and drive the eight kilometers into town to work.

Then again I’m a fast track expert. I can leap from my reading chair, vault into the kitchen, fire a piece of bread into the toaster on my way to the makeup mirror while feeding the cat and making my lunch with my other hand.

I’m really, really good at multi-tasking.

I’m not so good at remembering to stand far enough away from a bonfire so that I don’t burn off my eyelashes.

I figured out the latter on one such rushed Monday morning while looking in the bathroom mirror when repeated applications of mascara from a new tube didn’t do a thing for me.

On closer examination, followed by a “deer in the headlights” reaction to my own reflection, I realized that my eyelashes on both sides were nearly gone.

“I smell burnt hair,” I had said to my outdoorsman the day before while he was eating a ham sandwich as I stepped back from a close stoking of the bonfire I’d worked on for a couple of hours prior to lunch. 

A quick reflex of hand to my ball cap and ponytail and, no, I was not on fire. I figured the smell was the singed fibers of my lumberjack coat and gave it no further thought.

And the next morning, there I was staring at eyelash stubble.

Thank the heavens above that my eyebrows were spared. I would rather hide under my bed for two months waiting for my eyebrows to grow in than draw them back on like I did in high school. 

That bout of stupidity left me with a look of permanent surprise on my face after a marathon plucking session forced my hand. Never again.

I was so sad about my eyelash funk I picked up my iPhone and asked “Siri” (the personal assistant and knowledge navigator application for Apple’s IOS) “Who is the fairest of them all?”

I expected the voice to reply, “Why you of course.”

Siri, who is programmed to know my name as Beth, was faster than a three-dollar pistol. “Snow White. Is that you?”

I flat-stared the phone and retorted, “Siri, my name is Beth, not Snow White.”

Siri said, “Ok, from now on I’ll call you ‘Beth Not Snow White,’ Ok?”

Fine. Two can play this game I thought to myself.

“I’d like my name to be ‘Little Miss,’” I said.

“Okay, from now on I’ll call you ‘Little Mess,’” said Siri.

Oh brother, indeed I am. I think I need a holiday.