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Friday, April 16, 2004
anything's better than cleaning out the fridge
I am procrastinating. (so what else is new?) Soon I will have to actually open the containers I've just pulled out of the refrigerator, and pour the contents into a bucket and empty it into the compost. But I need to gather my courage about me first. (or just wait and hope that T will do it for me... hem...). At least we finally have a microscope -- the budget didn't expand to fit a new one after all, all those months ago (hmm! was that the last time I cleaned out the fridge? couldn't be...), but we did find a serviceable one at a yard sale for A DOLLAR (high five for my bargain-hunting abilities, right?) and we've been wasting a lot of time today looking at everything from aquarium water (lots of swimmy things) to potato scrapings (lots of bulbous, teardrop-shaped cells) under it. So I'll have to gather some samples from the refrigerator scraps too. Hey, wow, maybe this will be a viable excuse for me not to clean it out so often -- as if, what, every two months is often? -- it's scientific research. Homeschoolers can get away with anything. ;-)
Oh my goodness, I think that's a record even for me. FOUR parenthetical statements in one sentence. I think I need to cut back; that's got to be bad for my health.
Among the horror-movie props that were in the refrigerator, I found four tiny cartons of grape juice, which had been there long enough that the sides were bulging out a little. We get these from the neighbor ladies, who get them from Meals On Wheels. They started giving my kids their juice months ago, I think because they are diabetic but I'm not sure. Anyway, by the time we discovered that none of us likes grape juice, they were already in the habit of giving them to us, and pretty soon we reached the point where we couldn't tell them we didn't like it without hurting their feelings. So now the whole family is complicit in this little white lie, wherein we thank the elderly ladies for the juice and then bring it home and either stow it in the refrigerator until it swells, or just pour it directly down the sink. I don't see as much gray area in life as a lot of people do, but lying to old ladies to spare their feelings is definitely a small area of haze on my otherwise pretty-much-black-and-white moral code.
We are on the lookout for a pair of kittens. Well, I am, and the kids are, but I don't think we've fully convinced T yet. Which I suppose is just as well, since now that we want kitties, nobody is giving any away. T insists on being sensible and saying that we should wait until after our vacation this summer, because the poor beasties would be left here alone for two weeks with only the occasional house-sitting visit to cheer them. Darn man, has to be reasonable when I get all excited and illogical about something. ;-) I have been Pet-Free By Choice for so long that I feel like a bit of a traitor to the cause, caving in like this, but the kids have been seeming very interested in having something furry to pet -- fish aren't terribly cuddly, after all -- and a dog is out of the question right now. And I can just see them on their respective therapists' couches in thirty-odd years talking about us: KID: "No, we never, ever had a pet growing up. Mom and Dad just wouldn't let us. We couldn't afford it. We didn't have space. Too much trouble." THERAPIST: "INteresting. And how did that make you feel?"
