In the corner of my mind…

She did this. I don’t remember how I found her except that it was on twitter and her updates (aka twits) crack me up.

The Rules:
1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags people, hits them with a dodgeball, curses their mother, shakes his or her ass and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment and a swarthy grin, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Or don’t.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

The Questions:

What was I doing ten years ago?
I don’t remember very well. I was single, childless and had been back in my hometown for two years after college. I believe I was living with two of my friends, Josh & Jimbo, with a ton of friends in and out all the time. I was trying to draw out the university living conditions after graduating but worked full-time from 11am-8pm at the phone company. We lived in a 100 year old house that had horrible plumbing but great wood trim. The basement seemed haunted and the neighbors let their cat out on a leash. We drank a lot of beer and were mostly irresponsible. I was driving a green Saturn with a great stereo (whoa, aim high!) after dumping my p.o.s. white civic on my little brother who had recently earned his driver’s license. I traveled to San Francisco, Portland and Breckenridge, Colorado that year. I wish I had visited more exotic, far-off locales at the time and would like to time travel back to tell myself to quit my job to travel around because I would become a parent less than two years later.
What are five things on my to do list for today?
It is relatively late in the day so I’ll recap what I did today thus far:

1) Got oldest to camp which involved; searching for the swim trunks, making lunch, feeding him breakfast and begging husband to drive him the half a mile to camp

2) Took triplets to the park

3) Went to my parents’ house and hung out with my sick Dad and sickish kids (some are, some aren’t). Everyone has the same respiratory b.s. sickness.

4) Watched new gutters be installed- one of the shirtless guys was wearing light-colored denim shorts that were, get this, roll-cuffed.

5) Talked with contractor owner who arranged new soffits, fascia, front door and gutters but who can’t fix the front porch which has rotted joists and needs to be torn down/rebuilt before the new siding can be installed. Called carpenter/roofers found on Craigslist asking for bids on rebuilding the horrible fecking front porch from hell.

Snacks I enjoy?
microwave popcorn, graham crackers, cereal, chocolate, sunflower seeds, popsicles. now i’m hungry.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire?
1)Move to a house where each of my kids could have his/her own room and we could have a majestic master bedroom/bathroom suite with a jacuzzi and our own sinks. And a pool.

2)Establish huge college funds for my four kids and nieces/nephew

3) Go on a much belated honeymoon. Take my whole family (parents, siblings, in laws, nieces/nephew, others) on a luxurious vacation then take my friends on another luxurious vacation then go on more vacations

4) Buy a new mini-van for family transport and a really nice car for myself

5) Finish Masters/Pay for husband to finish degree

Three of my bad habits?

1) Running late

2) Procrastinating

3) Not returning phone calls

Five places I have lived?
Around my hometown and a few hundred miles away in a college town.

Five jobs I have had?
In no particular order… Cashier, Customer Service Representative, Marketing Manager, Customer Service Manager, Barista

Five people I want to know more about:
You and your mom with three other people. Hey, if you want some filler, do this thingy and lemme know.

Update on the last entry: It may be psychological, but I swear I can still smell those damn squirrels. I have spied a few remaining horseflies hanging around the windows and have been smacking the shit out of them with my newly purchased fly swatter. I bought a blue fly swatter versus the white one because it makes it harder to see the smashed insect viscera.

What made the rest of the squirrel day even more surreal was an appointment in my home two hours after the ordeal. The previous week, a market research representative called me and asked if I was interested in being paid $150 for cooking something in my home in front of three researchers (I signed up for market research last year and they call me all the time but I usually have to drive 25 miles to their office so I politely decline. This is the first time they offered to come to me.) Let’s see, you pay me to cook dinner and I don’t have to go anywhere? Why yes, come on in. I agreed to let them watch me cook and set the appointment for the same day that ended up being dead rodent day.

After I opened the windows, febreezed the basement, got rid of my wheezing daughter and put the boys down from a nap, I thawed out the raw chicken requested for the meal I would be cooking. Two women and a man that I later learned were varying types of engineers and scientists flew to the Midwest from the west coast to watch me cook chicken. I wondered if I should explain why my home smelled like decomposition as I described my meal-making habits. After thirty minutes of talking, I had to tell them what happened earlier in the day and I believe there is now an entire office full of people in Northern California hearing about the dead squirrels in my fireplace. The gentleman leading the research told me I should contact This American Life and proceeded to tell me the story of the squirrel on fire (aka First Day, The Squirrel Cop Story) that causes a huge amount of problems. I don’t know the details but now I need to know the whole story and have ordered an NPR CD with the tale because I! Must! Know! Support NPR and self-immolating squirrels! Who knew squirrels caused this many problems?

The Market Researcher Guy also told me he heard there are people working on creating “meat”. He said it is the next step beyond creating tissue grafts in a laboratory- making muscle tissue to eat as meat without the messy “live animal” part which leads to a vegetarian conundrum. The other researcher said, “But, it has to move to be edible muscle tissue or it will be mushy- it needs electro-stimulus. Maybe they’ll shock it?”. I have been thinking about this conversation for days but haven’t googled it yet. Where to start? With the idea that most of my protein source needs movement to be good eatin or with the vision of a white-coated lab tech creating a headless cow in a giant petri-dish? Suddenly, tofu sounds really appetizing. I have a feeling those market researchers will be remembering the day in my home for years to come.

I think the squirrels/vacuumed ashes/getting paid to cook chicken was perhaps the single most surreal day of my life perhaps only topped by the day I found out I was having triplets.

On another note, I finished Stiff and enjoyed the author’s writing style so much that I went out and bought her new book, Bonk (The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex) so I’m done with reading about and hopefully finding dead bodies (be they of the rodent or human variety). I had to ask the nice lady at the bookstore where I could find Bonk – under science if you were curious- then said Bonk roughly ten more times because it is a funny word and it made the fact that the book is about sex more acceptable. Hmm, I found it easier to buy a book on human cadavers than a book on sex. Paging Dr. Freud.

I don’t often read books about dead bodies but Stiff by Mary Roach was recommended by a few people and I liked the conversational, humorous style in the few pages I skimmed at the bookstore. I am a bit morbidly fascinated but only in the socially acceptable “I watch CSI” type way. When I see roadkill, I generally look away and have told my family I don’t want to rot in the ground (actually, I would rot in the ground in the green “6 ft Under” Nate kind of way but I don’t want to be embalmed and placed in a vault to congeal). In Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Roach casually explores what can be done with people after they expire besides burying or burning. She watched a beating heart come out of a cadaver for organ donation, she explored the history of bodies used as crash test dummies and the Tennessee body farm where decomposition is studied.

The book is occasionally gross but not nearly as horrific as you would think. I have been reading chapters before bed which I must admit has given me some freaky dreams (no worse than Cloverfield). I have been thinking about the meat that is my body and generally considering what happens to flesh and bone after death more than usual because of this book.

This week, horse flies started gathering around my light bulbs and windows. I’ve had other entomological issues in our home (Once, we had moth larva hanging from our kitchen ceiling. They hitchhiked in on an expired bag of cat food. We learned you should never buy or keep old pet food- different inspection/bug standards.) but never big ass flies. I consulted Google and the results all mentioned rotting, wild animals. Oh no. There had been a smell around the lower level of our house for a few weeks. It wasn’t over powering and it smelled more like bad fish than “death” so I assumed the kids had thrown some food somewhere or there was a moldy washcloth behind a laundry basket downstairs. I searched around but didn’t find anything foul and just hoped to move on without discovering the source.

This afternoon, I walked downstairs and screamed. Have you ever seen/read Amityville Horror? The flies? GAH!?! There were large flies covering the windows and buzzing around my screaming carcass. I called a pest control company while swatting at the thankfully slow flies with every magazine I could find. The woman on the phone agreed with Google and said horse flies meant something was rotting. She didn’t recommend fogging if I had young children but suggested I find the decaying creature. MADON!

I circled around the room, throwing everything in my path in huge bins but could not find anything even remotely fuzzy with mold. Then, a realization. The fireplace. Shit. I made my way to the fireplace still stuffed with ashes from last winter and opened the accordion, glass doors. I saw fur and the stink hit my nose- still fishy but stronger. It was a squirrel or what was left of it. I noticed its lack of eyeballs and have blocked everything else out.

Last weekend, Mike threw the fireplace tools away because the kids wouldn’t leave them alone. Dammit, the one time I needed the grabby tool was four days after he cleaned the garage. I grabbed a blunt tipped shovel, a broom, a stick and head back to the fireplace. By this time, the two year old’s are on the stairs screaming and crying because Mom is freaking the fuck out and muttering, “It is only a dead squirrel, it is only a dead squirrel”. My oldest son’s friend had wandered in and he found a toy bug vacuum so he was following me around trying to vacuum the still circling horse flies.

I tried to sweep the squirrel corpse into the shovel but the damn thing was stiffer than if it had been run over by a asphalt paver. I stuck it with the stick and it may as well have been made of concrete. I spun around and grabbed bright pink and purple plastic hair crimpers from the kid’s Dora the Explorer Vanity Set. I grabbed the squirrel corpse with toy hair crimpers and threw it at the trash (of course I missed and had to pick the thing up again). I looked back in the fireplace and realized there was a second, smaller squirrel body and threw it in with the other one. At least they didn’t die alone.

The squirrels were in the trash but the ashes had fur mixed in and the stink was still in the air. Those squirrels had been dead for a while and there were some pieces left behind. I rushed to the garage for the wet ‘n dry vac, taking careful steps to duct tape the hole in the hose and making sure to hook it up to the suck side instead of blow. I turned it on and attacked the smelly, ashy squirrel remains. As soon as I started sucking out the rodent grave, the kids started screaming and the room was suddenly quite foggy. I realized the vacuum was spitting the dead squirrel ashes all over the room. The two year olds were still on the stairs crying and the smoke detector started going off because the room was covered in falling ash.

At this moment, my sister walked in with a can of Raid and asked if we were okay. She snapped me back to reality and helped me get all the kids, especially the one with the breathing problems, out of the house. I got everyone out, went in and opened the windows downstairs. The horse flies flew right out the windows while I dumped the squirrel remains into a trash bag, sprayed some Febreeze and closed the fireplace.

I am on the last chapters of Stiff and reading about new, ecologically safer ways of dead human beings. 2 small squirrels created enough stink, bugs and decay to clear my house and I keep thinking, “How did John Wayne Gacy store all those bodies under his house? My God, the smell!” It is probably just coincidence that I’m reading about what happens to bodies after death but those squirrels made reading this book a much more visceral experience.

The smell and the horse flies are almost gone now and things are returning to normal. I don’t think I’ll ever look at the little tree rodents or Wet ‘n Dry Vacs the same way ever again.