I am always surprised that one of the number one things people ask me is “how do you find things to write about?” My puzzled response will forever be “how do you not?” Surely, I am not alone in finding life absurd, hilarious, puzzling and sometimes just outlandish?
Doesn’t everyone have a dog who trespasses through wet, white paint and then strolls all over the hardwood floors of their home before relaxing on a leather sofa waiting to be discovered? No, just me?
Okay, what about after you have successfully recovered from that absolute shock and convinced yourself that those vestiges of white pup paw prints are honestly charming, you carefully wrap and throw the used paint pan and roller into your trash tote. The next day you awake to discover that raccoons have gotten into the trash overnight, unwrapped the wet paint roller and tracked tiny white raccoon paw prints all over your new vinyl decking? Do you mean to tell me that this doesn’t happen to everyone?
Boywonder suggested that we track the white raccoon prints from the back porch “back to their home.” Such a sense of humor, that one. Their home you say? I’m pretty sure those paw prints are just gonna traipse right back around to the front porch. According to the raccoon gang we are apparently harboring, their home is HERE. If we learned one thing this summer, it is that raccoons have no sense of personal space or boundaries. Mind you this all happened in the span of 24 hours. It was literally ONLY Monday.
I am not here to tell you how to successfully remove white latex paint from vinyl decking. I have no idea. If someone has that information, please feel free to share. I feel like any solution is going to involve a lot of “elbow grease.” Since the environment is currently trying to kill us, I’m not doing any elbow greasing outdoors.
While I was busy keeping close watch on the potential for being poisoned by produce and explosive gastrointestinal distress, we were instead besieged by smoke. I did not see that coming. Literally.
There is so much smoke in the air right now, it’s hard to see across the front yard to the road. I’m slow on the uptake, so at first I just assumed someone was burning brush or trash. I live in a very rural area. Based on decades of watching my rural peers, anything can be a bonfire if you keep enough marshmallows and sticks on hand. Smelling something burning isn’t usually a cause for much alarm. Waking up to a haze so thick it’s more like fog.
Turns out where there is smoke there is fire. So much fire. Canadian and U.S. wildfires are raging, and the smoke is billowing out across the entire Midwest. So far, the advice we seem to be hearing from health officials is “try not to breathe?” I’m not sure how that works. Trying to provide more guidance as a whole, we are told to stay indoors and NOT eat vegetables right now.
I have trained my WHOLE CHILDHOOD for this! I knew my time to shine would arrive. Close the windows. Pull up a sofa. Give me a big bowl of sugar frosted puffed cereal and a full slate of Scooby Doo cartoons and I could easily hole up for a week! Vegetables? Never heard of ‘em? I will return to the diet of my youth. As of now there hasn’t been a single significant concern that Little Debbie snack cakes are going to poison us.
