Why I Hate Houseplants

1. They drop leaves on the floor.
2. They don’t tell you they are hungry.
3. Their names never really suit them, so I find them really hard to remember.
4. They die.
5. Dirt in a pot indoors is good for a cat to dig in.
6. Dirt in a pot indoors is good for a cat to pee in.
7. Dirt in a pot indoors is good for a cat to poop in.
8. You are supposed to keep them alive.
9. They never pay for dinner.
10. Sometimes they get horrible little tiny insect infestations.
11. They cast dreadful shadows.
12. They fall off the shelves.
13. Their methods of reproduction are very confusing.
14. Most of them are poisonous.
15. Any time anything interesting happens, they attribute the cause to a magical invisible being that lives in the dirt.
16. They have all these needs (light, water) where you can’t give them too little or too much.
17. Most of them look delicious to cats.
18. They don’t know any funny jokes.
19. They don’t help with housework, and they never answer the phone.

Absolutely True and Completely Unexpected Message #4

This appeared in my inbox yesterday. How unlikely for Mark Zuckerberg to have a Hotmail account! What an opportunity! Yeesh.



Dear Friend, 


My name is Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive Officer of Facebook. We have recently partnered up with Apple regarding a one-time test project today, we are finding people who can test the upcoming Apple iPad3 and keep it for free. Apple mackintosh want to make their product perfect before going public. We select users from our system database randomly and you have matched with our latest drawing. 


We are operating this project for one-day only. All you need to do is CLICK HERE to check out our web site made for this project and fill out the short survey to obtain your chance of test an iPad3 and keep it for free. Simply make sure you enter your email so we can locate our records to guarantee that we have reserved one for you. That's it! 


If you have any question or concerns, feel free to e-mail me back. However, you need to claim 1st to ensure one will be set-aside for you before the deadline ends. We do understand that you may not receive this e-mail until after the deadline, but, we suggest you check out the web site to see if we still have yours on hold, which we often-times do because others may haven't claimed theirs in time. 


Mark Zuckerberg 
CEO, Facebook

Oh, Deer

The house we are renting has large windows, and the windows want washing, inside and out.  First I wasted a whole bottle of Windex and a whole roll of paper towels, having poked around in the closets looking for a proper squeegee, and finding none.  The dogs watched me going at the windows the whole time. I thought I was being interesting. It was the deer in the yard, though, that was the interesting part, and as I came in, out went Captain for a long, deer-chasing romp.

Later, I made for the closest hardware store I know of, in the near-ish town of Cross River. The hardware store makes keys, sells paint, and has the parts of your running toilet that will make it stop running. Like so many of the small hardware stores you find in strip-malls, it’s packed to the rafters with merchandise. I always find that you walk in and ask the guy behind the counter. Don’t bother looking for yourself. I was shown a few options, and picked a squeegee for which one must provide a handle. The clerk found a couple of possibilities for the pole, none of them perfect, but he did secure the pole to the squeegee with a screw, charging me for neither the pole nor the screw. Along the way, I got a bit of history (the upstairs of the store used to be the screening room of the old movie theater), and some predictions for snow this winter.

In Westchester County, deer (and black bear) can be hunted only by bow, and the season is from October 15^th to December 31^st. I have already met one man who has permission to hunt on this land.  The deer here are certainly plentiful, and a danger to motorists. I see them every morning when I walk the dogs to get the paper, all day when I look out the windows, every afternoon when I walk the dogs on the road, and every day when I am out driving.  There was a large doe killed recently on Cat Ridge Road, where I walk.  One of its hind legs was broken in the accident, and stuck out from its body at a disturbing angle. It happened on Friday night, and the carcass had been removed by Monday midday. Scavengers had only just started to make progress on it.

The deer here in Westchester seem well adapted to seeing people and cars and trucks, and give everything a good, long, dumb stare before walking or running away.  There is a group that I have seen grazing dully at the margins of the Taconic Thruway near Lagrangeville. The speed limit is 50 mph, but many people seem to take that as a polite suggestion, like flossing daily or changing your smoke-detector batteries twice a year. The one thing that seems to make deer try to leap high and run fast is my knuckleheaded dogs; they charge at deer, barking furiously in frustration, running as fast as they can with no plan for maneuvering over the stone walls that the deer hop over without much visible effort.  Maybe if deer made more noise I would respect them more.

My landlord informs me that he likes seeing the crows and ravens and vultures and eagles that come if the bow hunters leave the entrails after gutting a deer.  As a dog owner, the possibility of my dogs getting into rotting deer entrails is pretty scary, but it is not nearly as scary as the prospect of preventing any and all Vizsla escapes from October 15^th to December 31^st, from dawn to dusk.  I am pretty sure that Vizslas look as much like white-tail deer as any dog can.  

Dolls

A little girl in the 1970s may have been a tomboy, but she was expected to play with dolls.  I had three large dolls and two baby dolls.  The babies came in matching yellow dresses and had bunk beds with a ladder, and all you did with them was put them to bed.  The larger dolls included a bride, a blond in a white pinafore, and a more glamorous flaxen-haired doll in a pink dress. If I had other dolls, I gouged out their eyes and cut off their hair and they did not survive to be remembered.

After I went off to college, my mother had my room repainted and redecorated.  She befriended someone who made beautiful hand-sewn doll clothes for fun, and she sent my dolls to the doll hospital to get the ink removed and their eye-lashes replaced and their hair untangled and re-styled.    At the time, I wondered if the dolls were made-over because I was the one wanting the make-over, but no one had the courage to say. In any case, the next time I visited, there they were, lined up on a shelf, more terrifying than ever.

Some people are afraid of clowns. I am afraid of dolls. They have glassy, unblinking eyes. They have no elbows. They don’t wear underwear, and if they do, it’s doll underwear. Their faces have unchanging, blank expressions. They always seem like they are up to no good, and you never catch them doing anything.  As a kid, I could not sleep if they were sitting up. I would lay them all down so their creepy floaty eyes would close. Sometimes I would also bury them under a nice thick, safe layer of stuffed animals.

I had Barbies too, and I played with them a lot. Barbie wasn’t scary. She was a tiny mannequin. She had a convertible and camper van and friends. Baby dolls don’t have friends. You could make clothes for Barbie and you could carry her in your fist the way you might grip a flashlight.

Stuffed animals were the best though, and the more you had the better it seemed. May of my stuffed animals survived to my adulthood, and were shipped to me to live in this big messy house I’ve called home for the past 17 years.  In September of 2008, a young dog we call Captain came to live with us, and he loves stuffed animals.  Captain really loves stuffed animals. First, he chews off their eyes and their noses, and then he pulls out all their stuffing. Once, we had a mountain of stuffed bears, dogs, rabbits, and ponies. Now, we have none.