Jackadilloprincess.com

Sometimes I hate being an adult.  Obviously, there’s the fact that I can’t buy Happy Meals anymore without getting disdainful looks from the teenager behind the counter.  I can’t get away with skipping through the office, and I’d look pretty ridiculous riding a bicycle with a banana seat.  The big one, though, is that money actually matters now that I’m an adult – so when it’s suddenly taken away, it usually stings.

Rob called me at work at 8:57 this morning to tell me that he is no longer employed.  He’d just been informed that his company was “restructuring” (is there any better cliché for this situation?) and they were going to have to let him go.  He was unhappy, of course, but he’d seen it coming, as they’d been giving him less and less to do lately.

There is one obvious perk to this development: I get to go around referring to myself as Rob’s sugar mama.  Other than that, though, the situation kind of blows.

I’ve spent the day trying to concentrate on happy thoughts.  Rob and I still like each other a lot.  (I know some couples can’t say that.)  We have two very cute dogs.  I still have my job, and I usually like it.  We just moved somewhere with much cheaper rent, and it has both central air conditioning and a dishwasher.  I’ve managed to keep a hamster alive for about nine months so far.  I ate hot wings for dinner (with ranch dressing!).  I finally found my Wolf Camera gift card and printed a bunch of pictures.  Rob is still in school in spite of all of the reasons he’s considered dropping out in the past.  He’s chosen a minor that’s made him more excited about his professional future than I’ve ever seen him.  Rob gets to design video games for the rest of his academic career, and hopefully beyond that, too.  And, of course, I’ve heard a rumor that “The Wonder Years” may be coming out on DVD. (I do love that Fred Savage.)

It’ll be ok.  Surely.

So today at w– uh, at home, I wasted some time by taking an online IQ test from www.highiqsociety.org.  I thought it was high time I proved my genius, so I could spend the rest of my life basking in fame and fortune, or at least wandering around with an expression of smug superiority on my face.

You have to score at least a 124 on the test to gain acceptance into the International High IQ Society, which I guess just means you get to pay $80 a year in dues to brag about how you’re in a semi-exclusive genius club.  If you take their online test and get a high enough score, they go ahead and extend you an invitation right there.  If you don’t, you get rejected, but you’re still invited to purchase your IQ profile for the low, low cost of $9.95.

There are two IQ tests available on the site.  One is for normal people, and one is for super-geniuses.  I took the normal one first, and actually did all right.  I barely squeaked by their lower limit for society admittance, and maybe I would have joined if I didn’t want to spend my money on DVDs instead.

Then I took the super-genius one, figuring the first score was a fluke and I was about to get the highest score ever and  become the president of the High IQ Society.

Sadly, it turns out I am not a super-genius.  (Who the hells knows Zimbabwean geography anyway?)  I guess I’ll have to cultivate other talents – maybe by auditioning for American Idol and becoming the next great pop sensation – because this time around I did not receive an invitation to the genius club.

Fine.

They’re probably just a bunch of nerds anyway.

Anyone who’s spoken to me lately knows that I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work for the past few weeks. (Of course, very few people have spoken to me, because I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work.) We have a 44-page special section coming out in the paper tomorrow that I organized and laid out all by my lonesome. It’s one of the bigger special sections that we do each year, and I’m always terribly stressed out (this is the first year that the stress didn?t make me cry) and worried about how it will come out. But at the same time, once the section is finished, I always feel accomplished and a bit proud of myself for pulling it all together.

Although I’ve been working at the paper for more than four years now, I’ve never been given a proper tour. Because I started as a lowly intern, nobody bothered to show me around, and I’d never even seen the press room before. (In fact, I could have told you more about the presses at the Fort Collins Coloradoan, which I saw once on a tour in college.)

Yesterday, my boss’s boss came by to ask if I was planning to do a press check on the special section. Here’s the rest of the conversation:

Me: Um, sure. How do you do a press check?
Boss’s boss: Just go to the press room and look through a copy of the section.
Me: Ok. Where’s the press room?
Boss’s boss: *Sigh.* I’ll go with you tomorrow and show you.

The section started printing this morning at 11, so we decided to go to the press room then to take a look at it. All we really had to do was flip through a copy and make sure everything looked all right. If it didn’t, well, that’s where the excitement would come in, because for once, after four years of working at a newspaper, I was in a position to yell “Stop the presses!”

Oh, the power.

Of course, it’s very expensive to stop a press run and start over. So I wasn’t actually allowed to stop the presses unless something incredibly dramatic happened, like a full-page ad was missing or a small child was about to be sucked into the rollers.

But still. It made me feel important, like Michael Keaton in “The Paper” when he suddenly realizes he has a conscience and brings the presses to a screeching halt to keep from printing a story that wrongly accuses some poor kid of being a murderer. Glenn Close was pissed, because as I previously mentioned, it’s expensive to stop the presses.

As I’m sure you all can guess, I didn’t get to be melodramatic and get into a fistfight with an editor hell-bent on making a morally questionable decision.

All I found was an incorrect font. All of the people in the room who were more important than me (pretty much everyone else there), just shrugged it off. So I shrugged it off, too.

Sigh.

Maybe it’ll be more exciting next year.

When I was on the tennis team in high school, I had a teddy bear that was dressed in a tennis outfit, complete with a tennis skirt and a little plastic racket sewn to its hand. The Tennis Bear (as she was officially known) was intended to serve as a lucky charm. But as she continually failed to help me win matches, she frequently became a target of my rage instead. After a particularly crappy shot in practice, my bear might get smacked against the fence with my tennis racket a few times, which served the dual purposes of making me laugh and allowing me to let out some aggression. (I didn’t do this during matches, of course, because of sportsmanship. During those, my tennis bear was granted a reprieve and allowed to just sit on the sidelines, watching me lose.)

Eventually, I began abusing The Tennis Bear outside of tennis practice, using her as therapy whenever other life events made me unhappy or angry or both. When I found out I was not only rejected by Johns Hopkins University, but Rice University as well, my Tennis Bear was thrown against my bedroom wall with ferocity, until my brother and his girlfriend — now his wife — demanded that I stop. When my senior prom was decidedly less than magical, my bear received the brunt of my anger. She never fell apart, and she kept the same dazed expression of mild contentment on her face for the duration of my teenage years. She was a good bear.

Today, I found myself wishing I had something to hit, to throw, to kick, to punch, to shatter. But now that I’m a grown-up, I’m just not allowed to do that. I have a cow stuffed animal on my desk at work, but I can be fairly sure that I’ll get a stern lecture if I throw it against the wall for an hour. When one of my writers fails to do an assignment, a very important ad is misplaced, no one returns my phone calls or e-mails, the bank takes its sweet time about putting money in our account, and I spill a huge cup of Mountain Dew all over a Taco Bell lobby, I just have to stay calm and try not to cry. Shutting myself in a closet and kicking the walls is just not an option.

Last night, Rob and I went to see Superman Returns at a local theater. One of the few perks of my job is that I can have free movie passes pretty much any time I want them. They’re the good kind, too, that let you go to ANY movie — not just the ones that have been out for a month. That’s why I take advantage of this perk regularly. Unfortunately, the employees don’t always recognize the passes, and they sometimes tell us we can’t use them on newly released movies. When I point out that it says “valid for any movie any time” right there on the pass, they generally concede and give me my tickets.

Last night’s experience was an exception. It took a few minutes of actual arguing before she finally said, in a snarky, superior way, “Whatever. Fine. I don’t even care.” Then she turned off her microphone and kept grumbling to her smirky little ticket-booth cohort, completely oblivious to the fact that I could still hear her. Finally she shoved the tickets back through the slot and said, “Enjoy your movie,” in a way that suggested she was really hoping I would choke on my popcorn.

As we walked away, I was obviously fuming. The first 20 minutes of the movie were ruined for me because I couldn’t let go of how mad I was.

“You should have punched her,” Rob said.

There are two reasons I didn’t do that. 1. I don’t punch people. 2. She was behind a pane of glass.

I don’t know why I let this silly little incident get me so riled up. I think it’s partly because I simply can’t stand being challenged when I know for sure that I am right. But it’s also because I was frustrated and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. It would be better if I could take a cue from a certain little kid I know, and allow myself to be distracted from my anger by a funny face or a silly, made-up game. It’s too bad that I have a much longer attention span than she does, and I am able to hold a grudge. It’s a skill I’ve honed over the years.

I found my Tennis Bear tucked into a Rubbermaid storage bin just before we moved into our new apartment. It occurs to me now that I should have brought her out of retirement. Maybe I was on the right track when I was younger, letting out my anger whenever it reared up, and then moving on to something else. Teddy bear abuse wasn’t a perfect solution – some problems just aren’t that easy – but it sure helped me feel better for a few minutes. Instead of standing in a Taco Bell, staring at a dripping, sticky table with a tear sliding down my face, thinking that I just didn’t need one more thing to go wrong today, maybe I can just blame the bear. Instead of spending the afternoon silently raging at the Taco Bell corporation for making unstable, top-heavy, the-size-above-large cups, I can throw The Tennis Bear against the wall and go on with my day.

She won’t mind. She’s a good bear.

You can’t see them very well, but I have bruises on my face that hurt every time I brush my hair out of my eyes or rest my chin on my hand. A couple of my front teeth hurt, too, from a blunt whack to the face.

I thought about making up an excuse for how this happened to me, just in case the bruises turn a violent purple and invite questions from friends and family. Maybe if I come up with a good excuse, I can protect the reputation of someone who is very dear to me.

The person I’d be protecting is … well, it’s me. I didn’t want everyone to know that I’m a damn idiot.

Rob and I went to a wedding in Greeley on Saturday that was held at a big, nice house owned by a friend of the groom’s family. The ceremony was performed in front of a beautiful garden area, and the reception was under a tent on a nearby lawn. Alcohol was flowing freely from the open bar and cases of beer driven in from Wisconsin, and after most people were good and liquored up, we played soccer and then watched the USA vs. Italy World Cup soccer game. (Go Beasley!)

Now, I have to point out here that I hadn’t been drinking. Not only is it against the rules right now for baby-making reasons, but I was also Rob’s designated driver. So keep in mind that I was absolutely sober when I did the following.

Most people were still watching the soccer game or drinking at the bar, and I decided to go inside to use the bathroom. Everything was fine until I started through the lower-level sliding glass door, which, to my painful surprise, was closed. I ran into it face-first, with a deafening thunk that should have attracted the attention of everyone else at the wedding. Fortunately, they were all drunk, and no one noticed.

I was so embarrassed that I didn’t realize how much it hurt until after I’d opened the door and found an unoccupied bathroom. That’s when I noticed that my teeth hurt so bad I thought I’d knocked a couple loose. Looking in the mirror, I saw big red marks on my forehead and my chin, and then I noticed that I’d also taken a layer of skin off my right knee.

I immediately started to worry that I was going to get dark purple bruises on my face, and tried to think of how I was going to explain this to people. I was not remotely interested in telling the truth.

It briefly crossed my mind to tell everyone that Rob hit me. (The I-ran-into-a-door excuse is such a cliche explanation when a husband smacks his wife around, so I thought people would assume Rob was evil whether I told the truth or not.) I ran this idea by Rob, and he was less than thrilled with my plan. “Why can’t you just say you got hit by a soccer ball?” he asked me. Hehe, oops, I hadn’t thought of that. Sorry, sweetie.

I only told one other person, my friend Marisa, what happened. We went back to the scene of the accident and found a perfect print in the glass, showing the left side of my face in squished profile. This is when Marisa pointed out that “this side of the door doesn”t even open, dear.” She never calls me dear. She must reserve that for times when people do something really, really stupid. I left the print there for a little while, until I was tormented by visions of someone discovering it and pointing it out to all the other drunk people. I ended up trying to wipe it away with the sleeve of my sweatshirt.

Fortunately, my bruises have not turned purple, so I don’t have to answer embarrassing questions. Past injuries have taken a few days to become visible, so I’m still worried that my coworkers will soon distrust Rob and that my uncle Walter will soon feel obligated to fulfill an old threat. (”She was the first baby I ever held. So if you ever hurt her, you will disappear. Not just gone, but Jimmy Hoffa gone.”)

Please don’t hurt him, Uncle Walter. He’s not abusive. Your niece is just very clumsy.

The wedding was not the only occasion punctuated by a clumsy injury of mine. A few months ago, my parents, my brother and I drove to Texas as fast as we could to see my grandmother one more time before she died. At the time, we believed she wouldn’t live more than a few more hours. When we arrived at the hospital, my cousins Ina and Shirley were waiting outside to tell us to hurry into my grandmother’s room, because she was awake and talking more than she had in a couple of days.

After visiting with her for a while, we went out to eat at Applebee’s with aunts, uncles and cousins who had also rushed into town to see my grandmother. We were all relieved that she was still with us, but also exhausted and worried for the days ahead. In short, it was no time to add more drama to our day.

We ate dinner and everyone climbed back into their cars to head back to the hospital or check into hotels. At my parents’ minivan, my brother and dad had already gotten into their seats, and the front passenger door and sliding door were still open. During the trip, it had become my habit to put my right hand on the post between the doors and sort of swing myself inside. It helped with leverage, and it made getting into the van that much more fun.

I had just put my hand there when my mom got into her seat and shut the door – right on my fingers.

My brain was not working. I couldn’t make my mouth say the words, “Mom, please open the door. You’re crushing my fingers.” Instead, I stood there and said, “OW, OW, OW, OW, OW.” This was not enough information for my mom to immediately understand what was wrong.

My brother and my dad had seen what happened, and neither of them could find the right words, either. They were too transfixed by the sight of my arm on the outside of the van and my fingers on the inside.

In the end, my mom had to figure it out on her own.

Because the sliding door on the van was open, there was no ridge for me to break my fingers on, and the weatherproof padding was enough to keep my hand from being seriously hurt. It was awfully hard to sign the credit card slip at the hotel a few minutes later, though, and my middle finger did swell up a bit.

After we checked into the hotel and took showers, my mom, my brother and I went back to the hospital to see my grandmother again. She was even more awake and talkative, and we all began to think that she just might recover from this. Finally, around 9 or 10 p.m., we decided to head back to the hotel for some rest, and we brought Shirley with us.

In our rush to get to Texas, some of us had forgotten some basic supplies, so we stopped at Wal-Mart on the way to the hotel. We bought what we needed and headed back to the van.

This time, my brother Jamie was going to ride in the passenger seat, and Shirley had already gotten into the back. Not having learned my lesson from the earlier incident, I put my hand in the same spot – right before Jamie closed the door.

I realized what was happening a little earlier this time, and I pulled my hand away quick enough that the door only caught the tips of my fingers before I yanked my hand all the way out. But it still hurt enough for me to yell “MOTHER FUCKER!”, which I don’t usually say in front of my mom, while I collapsed onto the van floor and clutched my hand to my chest.

Nobody knew whether to laugh or cry. My brother was torn between guilt for hurting me and annoyance with me for being kind of stupid. I just sat on the van floor and shook my head, laughing with tears in my eyes, wondering aloud how I’d managed to hurt myself in the same way twice in the space of about four hours.

My grandmother did begin to get better – it would be a few more weeks before she died at home, with all of her children at her bedside – and we drove back to Colorado in better spirits, exhausted but happy that we’d been able to visit with so much of our family.

For the entire ride back, of course, my family made me show them both of my hands before they would shut any car doors. The jokes lasted for weeks. My parents have since traded in their old minivan for a new one – this one with a handle that I can grab onto to pull myself inside, well out of the way of closing doors. I like to think that they did this for their poor, retarded daughter, to help her avoid needless injury.

Thanks, Mom and Dad. I owe you one.

Rob and I have been living in our new apartment for a little more than two weeks now, and so far we really like it. One of the side effects of moving out of our house, though, is that we now have to walk the dogs three times a day. I had been a little worried that walking them all the time would be a hassle, but so far I’m really enjoying being with them outside and watching them do silly puppy things. The downside of a backyard is that you miss a lot of those cute moments because they’re out there on their own.

So this morning before work, I was walking Kody, one of my two Pembroke Welsh Corgis, when a downstairs neighbor came outside and started talking to me. I recognized her as one of two women who live in an apartment below and to the left of us, who own a miniature Doberman pinscher. Here’s a rough transcript of our conversation:

Lady: Excuse me!

Me: Hi.

Lady: She’s been having to pick up poops from over here. (I assume “she” is this woman’s roommate. She’s gesturing to the grassy area in front of their patio.) They’re bigger than the poops my dog makes, and you have the only bigger dogs over here.

(I briefly consider pointing out that it’s possible that someone else in the other 150 apartments in our complex has a dog that’s bigger than her little terror, and perhaps that dog made the “poops.” I choose another route instead.)

Me: Well, no, we clean up after our dogs.

Lady: Every time? Are you sure?

Me: Yes, and actually we don’t walk our dogs over by your patio. We walk them over here and around the side of the building.

Lady: Oh. Ok. Where did you move here from?

Me: Just another area of town.

Lady: Are you just living here while you have a house built?

Me: … No. … But we might move to Texas when our lease is up.

Lady: We’re moving in June. We’re having a house built.

Me: That’ll be nice.

Lady: I just went through a nasty divorce after 16 years of marriage.

Me: Oh, that’s too bad.

Lady: It’s better than being married to a control freak.

Me: …

Lady: (Beckons to Kody so she can pet him.)

Me: (To Kody) Don’t jump up, buddy.

Lady: That’s ok, I love dogs. My sister has labs, too. I love labs.

Me: …

The conversation ended shortly after this and I went inside. Just as a side note, here is a picture of a typical Corgi:

And here is a picture of a typical lab:

I grew up in a 925-square-foot, three-bedroom house in Security, Colorado. Easily the most spacious area of the property was the detached two-car garage, which had a beaten-up work bench and a ladder that led to an attic area with plywood for a floor. I remember exactly one time that a car was actually parked in that garage.

At various times, the garage was home to fish, a turtle, hamsters and a rabbit. My brother once considered trying to assert his independence by creating a bedroom for himself out there, but the plan was scrapped because it was just too much effort to make the place habitable.

There is a reason our garage never had cars in it: It was filled to the brim with stuff. There were boxes of old toys, numerous little-used exercise contraptions, yards of foam rubber that “we might need someday,” and jars filled with dirt, courtesy of my childhood “chemistry experiments.” (The experiments consisted entirely of putting dirt in a jar, adding water and blue powdered carpenter’s chalk, and shaking it up to see what happened. Predictably, what happened was this: My mom yelled at me for using up all of her carpenter’s chalk. She presumably would have needed it someday.) We tried to avoid letting our two little Pomeranians into the garage for fear they would get lost among the piles of boxes and old furniture.

Because of our family’s inability to throw things away, we had to band together and attack the clutter with force the one time we chose to put a car in the garage. After my grandfather died, we inherited his yellow Opel GT and decided it should be protected from the elements. In order to do this, all of our stuff had to be piled precariously in one half of the garage and in the attic. Afterward, if it turned out you needed something from a box in the back corner, well, you were out of luck. Eventually, we sold the car and the junk crept back over to reclaim its space.

When we finally moved out of that house and rented it to newcomers, we still hadn’t managed to get rid of all of the stuff in the garage. We tried, we really did. My mom and I took several trips to the dump trying to empty out that garage, but in the end it just wasn’t enough. In fact, I’m pretty sure my parents gave the renters a discount on the first month’s rent to haul the rest away.

I’m telling you all of this to establish something: I am a packrat, and I was doomed to be a packrat from the start. It’s in my blood.

Up until now, this hasn’t been a major issue in my life. Having been a poor college student after I moved away from my parents, I simply didn’t have enough money to accumulate very much stuff. Really, I could just carry it all with me whenever I moved. And most of the time, I was moving into a larger place than the one I was leaving.

A couple of weeks ago, though, Rob and I decided to abandon our cute little rented house and move into an apartment in an effort to save money and pay down some debt. The apartment is pretty decent, especially because it has central air conditioning (yay!) and a dishwasher (thank god thank god thank god). The only problem is that it’s significantly smaller than our house, which means it’s time to pare down our stuff with a vengeance.

We didn’t have enough furniture to fill out our house when we moved in, so we’ve spent the last two years fixing that. Now most of the rooms have enough furniture that they feel crowded, and the garage has steadily accumulated boxes. (To our credit, though, we’ve always been able to park our car in there.)

So. Now it’s time for a mass purging of junk. We’ve decided what furniture to get rid of, and we’ve started gathering stuff for a yard sale.

This is hard. As a writer and a reader, how can I decide which books to get rid of? How can I decide which knickknacks and souvenirs are worth keeping? What if I need some of this stuff one day?

I’ve tried to be cold-blooded and ruthless about it. I’m ignoring the pangs of nostalgia and getting rid of the stuff I haven’t used in five years, including the roller blades that carried me through the dark and surely vampire-ridden areas of Spring Creek Trail in Fort Collins. I still have a road rash scar on my arm from those adventures. That’ll have to be enough to remind me of the fun I had, because the roller blades have to go. (”Sigh. Remember that time I almost tripped over a homeless man? Those were the days.”)

Yesterday I finally threw away an Air Force Academy sweatshirt I’ve had since high school, when I inherited it from my brother, who had inherited it from my father. My brother and I had a deep fascination with the AFA growing up, because my father sometimes took us to their football games when his boss gave him free tickets. It was usually an all-day event, as my father often worked on Saturdays. Because we lived so far south of the AFA, he would take us to work with him on game days, where we were stashed in an upstairs office and told to keep quiet until it was time to leave for the game. Occasionally we were able to avoid getting in trouble, but some spur-of-the-moment activities – bowling tennis balls to knock down pyramids of soda cans comes to mind – were not appreciated by the Whisler Bearing Company staff. After the football games, we’d often stop by the AFA visitor center, where we’d sometimes buy souvenirs. That sweatshirt was one of them. My dad wore it until it was appropriated by my brother, who wore it until I took it. I stopped wearing it about a year ago, when I got a couple of new sweatshirts to wear while bumming around the house. When I pulled it out of my closet yesterday, the tattered sleeves and the frayed collar told me it was time to let my beloved sweatshirt go.

There’s other stuff, too. I have things from old friends who I don’t see anymore. Countless things that remind me of people who were very special to me at one time, things that spark memories and make me reminisce for hours. I’m being as efficient as I can, throwing away things I don’t need or consigning them to the yard sale.

But I can’t get rid of it all. Bunnicula the fanged bunny rabbit has a home with me forever. The photo of me, Darrel, Kelly and Jackie at Six Flags Over Texas will stay on my bookshelf, even though the four of us have gone our separate ways. I have a feeling that, one day, when my kids are helping me clean out the garage, we’ll find these things in a box somewhere, and I’ll have a couple of stories to tell.

I’ve just taken a shower and started a load of laundry in an effort to wash away the last traces of a traumatic experience at Village Inn.

Rob and I have recently rediscovered our love of late-night meals at all-night diners, so we’ve been finding ourselves at places like Denny’s, Ihop and Village Inn a lot lately. Tonight seemed like a good night for chicken strips and an ultimate skillet, so off we went.

The Village Inn we went to is brand-new, and as such the whole place is just sparkling clean. I took care of that rather quickly.

Most of the meal was uneventful and involved us pondering the acting abilities of those who starred in American Pie, and discussing all the child actors we could think of who are now in rehab. Typical stuff.

I’d finished most of my meal when I decided I needed ketchup on my French fries, so I picked up the glass ketchup bottle and shook it. I knew something was wrong when I sensed something flying over my shoulder.

I paused.

Rob stared at me.

I set the ketchup bottle – now lidless – back on the table.

Rob tried not to laugh.

He says this was the funniest part of the ketchup catastrophe – those few seconds when I sat there stunned, wide-eyed, thinking “What just happened?”

I now have a personal understanding of ketchup trajectory. Let me tell you this: It can fly a long way.

I looked like a stabbing victim. I had a thick line of ketchup going from my hair down across my neck and shirt and across our table. A couple of globs of ketchup and the lid had also flown over my shoulder onto the booth seat behind me, where fortunately no one was sitting.

While I was trying to clean ketchup out of my hair, the waitress came by to see if we needed anything. Rob asked for maple syrup, and I asked for napkins. When she said “no problem,” her voice had that distinct tone that comes from a superhuman effort to contain laughter. I considered explaining that the lid hadn’t been screwed on, but I realized that there was absolutely nothing I could do to make this situation any less embarrassing.

Rob hurried to eat his pancakes, understanding that I had just become disenchanted with the Village Inn dining experience. The ride home was … ketchup-scented.

So, here’s your after-school special lesson: Be careful with your condiments. They can leave clothing stains and lasting psychological scars.

My old roommate Amber has a little frog named Christopher that’s been with her since junior high school. She inherited it from a friend who assured her that Christopher wouldn’t live much longer, as he’d already been around for several years. Now, decades later, Christopher is still alive and kicking.

Every once in a while when we were roommates, Amber would decide to give Christopher’s aquarium a thorough cleaning. This involved putting him in a butter bowl full of water while she attended to his tank. Usually, she was able to clean the tank without incident, but occasionally Christopher would set his sights on freedom and manage to leap his way clear of the bowl, splatting himself onto the kitchen floor.

This may seem like a worrisome situation, because the frog had an opportunity to truly escape and make himself a new home under the refrigerator. But it was not to be – his froggie skin would inevitably make him stick to the linoleum, and moving across the room involved slowly peeling his feet off the floor only to have them stick again with the next step. So, Amber always found him within a few inches of where he landed, struggling to make a run for it.

This was when the comedy started. Although Amber had owned Christopher for years, she could never bring herself to hold him in her hand. Whenever she attempted to recapture him, it always involved a lot of little-girl squealing and a high-pitched mantra of “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!” while she tried to herd him back into a butter bowl. Being the caring roommate that I was, I usually chose to stand back and laugh rather than actually try to help her catch him. Rob came to the rescue once, but usually Amber was on her own.

Today my hamster made her own bid for freedom while I was cleaning her cage. As usual, I put her in her little hamster ball and set her loose to run around the house. Even in her ball she often finds her way underneath furniture or gets herself trapped between electrical cords on the floor. After I finished cleaning her cage tonight, I went in search of her only to find her ball lying open on the bathroom floor. Apparently the lid had worked itself loose while she was running around, and she saw her chance.

It wasn’t until I had to search for a mouse-sized hamster that I realized just how many tiny spaces there are in my house. Even though some of our doors were closed, she could easily slip under them – she could have been anywhere. I was pretty sure she was gone forever, or at least until she turned up in one of my shoes some morning when I was getting ready for work.

Fortunately, Rob’s a better detective than I am, and he found her hiding behind my nightstand in our bedroom, already having found herself a nest of dog hair in which to make a new home. Now the trick was to catch her. This would have been easy if I were willing to pick her up – which I still can’t do. (I’ve tried, I really have. I just keep imagining her biting down and drawing blood. Lots and lots of blood. As a general rule I can handle some pain without too much fuss, but I don’t just go seeking it out.)

So the next few minutes involved me trying to herd my hamster back into her ball without actually touching her. I didn’t squeal or say anything in a high-pitched voice, but it was still ridiculous, and I was completely unsuccessful. After Rob gave up on me taking care of it, he took the ball from me and got her back into it himself. I guess I have to stop laughing at Amber and her frog now.

Someone left a comment on one of my most recent blogs suggesting that I wait a little while before having kids, and first make sure I can keep my hamster alive. I think I failed tonight’s test. But fortunately for my kids, I’m pretty sure I’ll never be afraid to pick them up. At least until they have teeth.

Within minutes of our wedding, people started asking Rob and me when we planned to start having kids. Maybe not within minutes, but at least within a couple of days. So far, we?ve always had other things to do. Rob is finishing school, I considered going to grad school, etc.

As Rob’s undergraduate career gets closer to completion, we’re running out of reasons to put off having our first child. This has been a huge topic of discussion between the two of us over the last couple of weeks, and I think we’re just about ready to start really trying. Weird.

Parenthood is a scary, exciting, daunting idea, and there are lots of things that worry me about it. Chief among those:  

 
1. What if my kid eats with his mouth open and makes those smacking, slurping mouth noises? I don’t think I could handle that.
2. What if Rob takes our kid toy-shopping and bankrupts us? You think I’m joking, but Rob is just dying to buy (age-appropriate, of course) toys for the child we don’t have yet. I think he hopes we’ll have a son, who he will secretly indoctrinate with Star Wars lore. God help me.
3. Where the hell will we put a baby? I suppose I could make room for a crib between the bookshelves and the TV in my office. I hope my kid likes Chuck Palahniuk novels, because he’s going to be staring at them through much of his babyhood.
4. What if s/he doesn’t like Harry Potter when s/he gets old enough to read it? This would be a true tragedy.
5. What if I have a daughter who loves Bratz dolls? I really don’t know a child-friendly way to explain to a little girl that I don’t want her playing with miniature skanky whores.
6. What if my kid has the biggest pottymouth in preschool? With the way I talk at home, my kid’s going to be quite familiar with the f-word by the time she’s two. I’ll be shunned at the Mommy & Me classes – not that I care what those bitches think.
7. What if we have another naming debacle like we’ve had with my hamster? (By the way, the name is still temporarily Hamtaro, on my niece’s suggestion.) If I have to ask my niece for baby-naming tips, I’ll probably end up with a son named Dora the Explorer.

These, of course, are just the major concerns. Then there are all the minor ones like raising a decent person with good morals, bringing a child into a scary world where scary things happen, how to survive the many months before she’s old enough to tell me why she’s so upset, and that I’ll never get any sleep again.

Casey says, though, that Rob and I will be fun parents. I guess I’ll just have to remember that and hope for the best.