Pescecide

You already know the ending to the story, so I’ll dispense with suspense and tell it first:

… about an hour after it arrived home from the County Fair, the fish died.

This is NOT Gerald.

The back story? Bubta’s friend Sam was at the Fair and remembered that he never got him a birthday present back in April.  Hew saw something he was sure Bubta would love and called him up, and Bubta called me at work:

Mom, Sam wants to buy me a rabbit for my birthday. Can I? Please?

I quickly put the kibosh on that little scheme.  Two minutes later he called me again.

How about a fish instead?

I articulated all the usual conditions: YOU have to remember to feed him and change his water (which I have heard is a chore that’s beyond gross) and how are you going to remember all that when you can’t remember to take your daily medicine and you have to spend your own money to buy supplies and we already have two pets why do you need something else to take care of and…

Well, OK. FINE.

Now, I have never owned a pet fish and as such know nothing about keeping them alive caring for them.  I think that fish are more appropriately caught and cleaned by Trained Professionals, then cooked thoroughly and served with a spritz of fresh lemon juice, a nice arugula salad, a side of creamy risotto and a crisp Pinot Grigio. Oh sure, I enjoy staring at a giant emergency room doctor’s office fish tank from time to time, or the occasional visit to a large aquarium facility (even if is teeming with more children than fish).

But Bubta, being 13, felt he knew aaaall there was to know. 

Even though he has never owned a pet fish.

I recall hearing that Fair Fish are not reknowned for their long life spans.

Bubta marched into the house, grinning like a damn fool, toting a small plastic box filled with water and pretty colored stones and a cool little fish, whose name, he informed us, was “Gerald.”  Then he marched back to the bathroom while announcing that iwas time to change Gerald’s water.

(I just learned this minute [Thanks, Google!] that the temperature of the water matters, AND, it’s supposed to be dechlorinated tap water.  Who knew?! I blame the sloppy water change as the primary cause of death, but determination of final cause is pending the autopsy.)

(KIDDING!)

Anyway, we went next door to feed our vacationing neighbors’ pets and water our other vacationing neighbors’ plants, and by the time we got home poor Gerald had passed on to the Great Plastic Fishtank in the Sky. God rest his fishy little soul.

Now, of course, Bubta wants to go to the Pet Store and do it up right. We assigned homework, though – he has to research fish care and come up with a list of care pointers and spend his own money. He’s pretty pumped about it, too.

Hey – at least it’s not a rabbit!

Self-discovery

Mad props to Audrey for somehow managing to make my chin look less weak than it really is. Click her link in my Blogroll 'cause I can't embed it in this caption, dammit.

I think it’s fair to say that, amidst all the socializing and photographing and touring and swimming and eating and boozing that took place at last week’s VA Blogfest, each blogger who attended had a chance to learn new things about herself. Some have already  written about it.

I learned a couple of interesting things about myself through the course of the weekend. For one thing? Turns out I get homesick. Yes, just like during sleepaway camp thirty years ago. It was all giggles and grins during the festivities, but when I would finally hit the wall at night and excuse myself to go to bed, I would close the bedroom door and immediately get all choked up. I laid there and thought to myself, how ridiculous are you being, you almost-42-year-old woman? You’re always plotting and scheming about getting away; now here you are, you’re away from the kids, and the husband, and the pets and the chores and the work and the Reality, and you’re laughing and drinking red wine and socializing with some of the finest people to grace God’s green earth, and all you can think about is how you’re homesick???

FREAK!

Nevertheless, that’s what I was feeling, at least right up until the moment I passed out from drinking too much wine sheer exhaustion. Go figure.

Something else that fascinated me is the extent to which you can connect with The People Who Live In Your Computer (as we call them), through nothing more than blog posts and comments. I’ve read and commented on lots of blogs and have come to “know” some really wonderful people. But it’s not everyone I’m tempted to learn more about, tempted to meet “IRL.” And yet, with this group, who came together quite randomly, and, for the most part, hadn’t met IRL before, it was as if we just picked up right where we left off the last time we saw each other.  Someone likened it to a family reunion, only without all the drama! I have joked with Laurie and Janice about how we surely were separated at birth; it was so pleasant to confirm once we met that we do have something resembling sisterhood going on.

Lastly?

THE BRIDGE.

I'd tell you to wave "hi" to the Bridge, but I want you to keep both hands firmly on the steering wheel.

This is the Governor Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge, and if they had named this bridge after me, I would have told them please, don’t do me any favors. This bridge links Virginia with southern Maryland on U.S. Route 301, crossing a wide portion of the Potomac River.  It has two narrow lanes with no median and a steep, panic-inducing 3.75% grade.

This bridge? Is the one that keeps appearing in my recurring nightmare… only I didn’t know it was this bridge until I drove across it for the very first time on Sunday, on the way to take Foolery to the airport near Baltimore.

And what’s even funnier? She says she has the SAME DREAM! You see? We truly are separated at birth. We even share nightmares! She also has the one that I do about being washed away by some huge, cresting wave in the ocean. 

How weird is that, that we would have the same recurring nightmares?

Anyway. The Bridge. So there I was, driving my high-profile vehicle up that grade. Up, up, up, and if you look at that picture, you can see what the problem is – it is that you can’t see what’s on the other side! It’s like ascending the first hill of a roller coaster, which is all shits & grins when you’re at King’s Dominion, but significantly less awesome when you’re at the wheel of a very large SUV, transporting someone who’s travelled the whole way across the country to Experience Virginia through the eyes of complete strangers.  You can almost hear the ratchety clacketa-clacketa-clacketa- you know, the part where you’re sure the coaster train will just slip and go sliding backwards into the station? 

So we’re going up and all I could think of was, what will happen when we s-l-o-w-l-y crest the apex? Will we pause, teetering, at the top? Will the decline be just as steep?  Steeper, maybe? If so, will my brakes go out?  Will it be straight, or maybe a series of impossibly twisting S-curves?  Or maybe, the road will just DISAPPEAR like it does in my nightmare, leaving me to plunge, with my poor, helpless passenger, into the depths of the tidal Potomac?

Seriously. My pulse quickens as I write about it and view the photo.  My hands are shaking the tiniest bit. I really am a freak.

I’ve never had an issue with bridges.  I love crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge; the view is breathtaking. Soup Husband Curt, however?  In his 20s, he would stop and make someone else drive his car across the bridge on the way to the beach. It was only in recent years that he decided, this is no way to live, and forced himself to drive across. He gets sweaty palms, but he can do it if he simply stares at the license plate of the car in front of him.

 But the Governor Nice bridge?  Not even a little bit Nice.

That’s about all of my soul that I care to (or even should) bare at this time.  Hope I haven’t scared you away, ha HA! Please, do check out my new blogroll, at the top of the right sidebar, to see what freakish fascinating realizations the other bloggers may have experienced during our time at summer camp Blogfest.

Herb gardening in 16 easy steps

With apologies to Chesapeake Bay Woman for ripping off imitating her patented tutorial format, I’d like to present my readers with one of my own.  It’s possible highly likely that you already know way more than I do about growing an herb garden; nevertheless, you might glean a humorous superfluous helpful nugget in my take on

 Container Gardening: Culinary Herbs

 1. Think about how nice it would be to grow and harvest your own herbs. Consider doing it, then forget procrastinate for two  five  eight years.  

2. Make and drink a Mojito, made using mint from a $3 plastic clamshell package.  Fall in love with said Mojito. Think about how many more mojitos you could make if only you had lots of fresh mint in your very own garden. Obsess about Envision this:

3.  Have an epiphany: This year, you WILL grow your own herbs. Be sure to choose a convenient location for your revelation, such as the gardening aisle in The Hundred Dollar Store Target.

4. Impulsively purchase three good sized, terra cotta-look, plastic planters (the ones on sale), two smallish bags of potting soil (whatever fits in your basket), and seed packets for mint, plus two kinds of basil, chives, parsley, cilantro, and rosemary.  Decide against buying those super-cute red plastic garden clogs. Pat self on back for remembering you already own a pair of pristine garden gloves and a trowel, thus preventing the unnecessary outlay of additional cash.

5. Bring items home and deposit them on your carport. Allow them to sit, untouched, for eons until the very end of May. Rationalize your procrastination as an attempt to prevent frost damage to your future seedlings, even though the last frost in Plant Hardiness Zone 7 is almost never later than the end of April. Which was a month ago.

6. Realize you don’t have enough bagged soil or pots for all the seeds you bought. Scrounge up two additional pots from previous failed attempts at horticulture. Take shovel into the woods out back and dig up some dirt.

7. Remember that you have been diligently placing kitchen scraps into a compost bin for seven years but have never actually used the compost for gardening. Decide that there’s no time like the present to mix some compost into the dirt.

8. Approach the compost bin with a pitchfork. Realize that the idea of composting is much more attractive than the reality of it. Ew! Nevertheless, push aside crushed egg shells, rotting broccoli stems and decomposing lime rinds to get to the good stuff underneath.

9. Fill the pots two-thirds full of the dirt-compost mixture. Bring them back to the patio. Open and drink a Diet Pepsi. Chat with Former Neighbor Dave, who drops by for a quick visit.

10. Open the bags of potting soil and place some in each of the pots.

11. Finally! Time for the seeds. Open the packets and scatter the seeds on the dirt. Ignore the instructions on each packet advising you to start seeds indoors 8-10 weeks before planting. Mentally calculate the possibility that you won’t have fresh herbs until the first frost in the fall, which, in Plant Hardiness Zone 7, could be as early as the end of September, well after the end of Mojito Season.

12. Top with more potting soil and water. Label the pots so you will be able to tell the cilantro from the Italian flat-leaf parsley when they begin to sprout at the end of the germination period, listed on the seed packages as 10-14 months weeks days.

13. While you’re busy ignoring key details, choose also to ignore the fact that you may as well live in a cave for all the direct sunlight your heavily-treed lot receives. Consider indoor grow-lights as an alternative, then quickly reject that as a sure invitation to unwelcome visits from The Authorities.

14. Consider, too, that you have no elevated surface on which to place the pots, thus leaving them at the exact height of most critters’ mouths. Daydream about buying a charming rustic potting bench from Smith & Hawken, then do more mental math to figure out how many packages of already grown and harvested store-bought herbs you could buy (approximately 80) for the price of a Smith & Hawken potting bench.

15. Resolve to stop by K-Mart’s Garden Shop on the way home to buy a few more herbs– already started — and another pot, so you don’t have to wait until Halloween for your first homegrown Mojito.

16. Further resolve to look into whether it’s possible to grow lime trees in Maryland, which is in Plant Hardiness Zone 7.