Here we are, late in the evening of the last night of my thirties. When I wake up (hopefully not before 6am like I have the past several days), I'll be 40. Egads. I wish I could come up with something pithy or reflective or remotely meaningful to share. I mean, I spent a bit of time reflecting on the past decade as I went about my errands and housework today. There certainly were some big highlights - becoming a mom; becoming an aunt (several times over); milestone wedding anniversaries (10th and 15th); the passing of my last remaining living grandparent; selling our first house, buying our second and moving; rejoining the workforce after spending most of the decade as a stay-at-home mom; heck, even being on Jeopardy - but right now? There's just one thing that is on my mind, and it is this:
I am fairly certain that we have a yeti living in our basement. I have proof. Proof in the vast expanses of greyish fur that amass in the collection canister of my vacuum cleaner every time I use it, like earlier this afternoon. I mean, it just seems obvious that such insane amounts of what is clearly animal fur would come from a gigantic, highly hirsute source like this:
than from something that's smaller than a breadbox (though admittedly pretty fuzzy) like this:
Yep, that's all I've got for this evening, my yeti-in-the-cellar theory. Clearly, old age has already begun fading away what few brain cells I have left. (Also, it's 10pm and I spiked my milk with mudslide mix at dinner, so there's that. Living la vida loca, for sure.) Before I toddle off to bed, I'd like to make one last plea:
Won't you please, pretty please, with sugar and sprinkles and a cherry on top, please help me make my fortieth birthday wish come true? You can read about it here. (I know I've been asking with every post lately, but the good news is that tomorrow is the last day I can bug you about it...) If you would please join me in doing 40 Good Things and leave me a comment letting me know what you did, I'll be the happiest 40 year old birthday girl ever tomorrow! Thanks!
Hubby was terrible thoughtful enough to share the following news item with me. Before I give you the link, I must warn you it is the most disgusting thing I have ever heard, ever. And I grew up on a working farm with livestock and have been raising a small human for the past six years, so I know all about disgusting. This, though? Takes the cake. The really, really, really disgusting cake.
Okay, now that you're duly warned, click here if you dare... and if you're REALLY brave, click on the video clip in the story that was aired on the local news affiliate. It features some amazingly awful awesome sound effects. I was giggling throughout, which is kinda hard to do with a dropped jaw. Seriously, while this was a totally horrific thing for this poor woman to have gone through, it is one of those things that you laugh at even while you're getting utterly squicked out. (Or maybe that's just Hubby and me. We laughed as we got squicked out, anyhow.)
The good news is that Hubby shared this news item with our insurance agent before sharing it with me, so he was able to reassure me via the response he got from our agent that should we find ourselves in a similar situation when we move into our new home, with similar..... liquids dripping onto us or our belongings from the ceiling, we will be covered. Whew.
I'd still freak the heck out, though. I want to take a shower just from thinking about it!! *shudder*
As any of you who have read my blog in the past week are aware, Kiddo has RSV. With the RSV has come thick-n-plentiful congestion and a frequent cough. I'd posted about this on my Facebook status the day before yesterday (because if one is going to whinge on about something, one might as well whinge on in any available forum, eh? I Twittered about it too...). Within an hour, I had no less than three of my friends reply to my FB status update to suggest that I rub Vicks on the soles of Kiddo's feet at bedtime.
Now, I'd heard of this practice before and dismissed it pretty much out of hand. I mean, when I was a kid, sure, Mom would slather my throat and chest with Vicks (then wrap a dishtowel around my neck, safety-pinned at the back, under my jammies) whenever I had a bad chest cold/cough. But that makes some amount of sense, what with the vapors having good proximity to the breathing and all. How on earth could having Vicks on the bottom of one's feet be beneficial, if one sleeps like a normal human (or even like Kiddo, with her various contortions and shiftings about in her sleep) and not pretzeled up like some master yoga practitioner?? Plus, the instructions include covering the Vicks-slathered feet with socks (for bed linens-protection purposes) which adds a further layer of vapor-blocking to the enterprise.
But still, THREE people. Three mothers who I find to be not only quite sane, but utterly trustworthy, no less. All three of them were telling me of their first-hand experience doing this and swearing to me that this Vicks-on-feet thing worked. I told Hubby about it, and he scoffed. I told him I thought I might try it, and he rolled his eyes and scoffed further, then remarked that it would "ruin the bedding" before considering the matter closed. I googled it and proceeded to read the Snopes article (oh Snopes, how I adore thee and thy debunking ways) which didn't give a solid confirmation or denial. I clicked back to my google search results and proceeded to read blog after blog after message board after message board post about how mom after mom tried this with much success. (Of course no one hopped onto the interwebz to announce they'd tried this method and found it to be full of hooey....) It sure seemed like a lot of anecdotal evidence... I considered the idea some more.
When I announced my intention to Vicksify her feet at Kiddo's bedtime, Hubby threw his hands up and shook his head, as Hubby is wont to do when I'm on to one of my "crazy schemes", but I persisted. I slathered the bottoms of Kiddo's feet with Vicks (well, actually, with Generic Mentholated Rub Goo) and double-socked them, just to be sure that the linens and vast horde of stuffed animals that share Kiddo's bed wouldn't be too camphortastic come morning. We also ran the cool mist humidifier (set to "tropical rainforest") with the Vicks scented pad thingy in the holder for additional mentholated effect. Hubby was rather skeptical, and to be honest, so was I, but I figured it wasn't going to hurt anything, except maybe a stuffed animal or twelve who might need a bath come morning.
Kiddo fell asleep. Time ticked by. Nary a cough sounded from her room. I was up until almost midnight (thanks to an afternoon nap that threw my schedule totally off) and still, not a cough. Kiddo is an impressive cougher, too - it rings out through the house, reverberating off the walls in such a manner as to make our house seem like one of those sanitarium tuberculosis wards of old. All I heard was silence. I checked on her before turning in at twelve. Sleeping soundly and breathing pretty well (she was snoring, as she does whenever she's congested). Hmmmm.
This morning, Kiddo woke us up shortly after seven. Not by coughing up a lung, mind you, but by scampering into our room, relatively bright eyed and bushy tailed. Well, bushy haired at any rate - the kid does an awesome "bed head" look, even with her hair secured in a pony tail or braids before sleep. No coughing. None. Her nasal congestion also was markedly improved - I did the "squirt squirt" routine (nasal saline spray and much nose blowing) with her this morning and there was hardly anything produced compared to the floods of ick that scoffed at the Puffs Plus and exploded over my hand of yesterday.
Now, it is entirely possible that this is all coincidental, that Kiddo would've been this much improved without any wacky old wives'-urban legend remedy. Hubby thinks it was just the added presence of vapors in the room and posited that had I done as my mother did and rubbed it onto Kiddo's chest/throat instead, it would've worked as well if not better than the feet. Hmmmm. All I know is that 24 hours ago I was thinking there was no way Kiddo was going to be healthy enough to go back to school tomorrow, and now today? I totally think she could. She has no fever, hardly any congestion, and has only coughed once since she woke up. We're staying home again today and having one more day of "taking it easy" just to be safe, but all signs point to YES on the return to school, and you'd better believe I'm rejoicing over that.
Either way, you can be darn sure I'm going to Vicks her feet again tonight!
My friend Alex posted about The Big Read from the NEA over on her blog. Purportedly, the NEA has come up with a list of their top 100 books and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these books. The object of this meme is to highlight the ones you've read and share the list on your blog. Well, I consider myself to be a fairly well-read person, what with being a bookworm and majoring in English and Textual Studies back in college and all, so I wanted to give this a shot. Here goes - the ones I've read are bolded:1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Well, I've read 51 out of the 100 books on this particular meme list, if you count the entire Harry Potter collection as one book. Also, I'd quibble about including "the Complete Works of William Shakespeare" as one book. I love Shakespeare and have read several of his plays, possibly even most of them. And why does Hamlet count separately? As Alex said over on her blog, I am a bit confused. So confused, in fact, that I googled the NEA's Big Read and nowhere on their site did I find this exact list, which is widely circulating on the blogosphere as it turns out. (Thanks, Google!) I wonder where this list originated, then....?
Anyhow, on the NEA's site, I did find the list of books in their Big Read initiative so far. They include (and I've bolded the ones I've read from these, as well) The NEA will be adding more books to their list in upcoming weeks, too:
Bless Me, Ultima- Rudolfo Anaya
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
My Antonia - Willa Cather
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest J. Gaines
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Call of the Wild - Jack London
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan
The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Leo Tolstoy
The Age of Innocence - Edith WhartonWashington Square - Henry JamesA Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula LeGuinThe Thief and the Dogs - Naguib MahfouzHousekeeping - Marilynne RobinsonThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark TwainOld School - Tobias Wolff
Well, I'm 8 for 18 on that list as it stands so far. Still better than the "average adult" who has supposedly only read six of the books above, I suppose.
It seems to me that someone, somewhere, has come up with a list or adapted a list (perhaps from the BBC's Big Read list from 2003?) to use in this post/meme, but it makes the fact that the list is confusing make a little more sense, if you get what I mean. I certainly could think of many more books that would be deemed worthy of appearing on any such list, you know?
Ah, the blogosphere - someone posts something and it just spreads like wildfire, accurate or not. Perhaps Snopes will debunk it sometime soon.......
