Get Sprung

YES for May Day!! Love this day- especially when it's 63° and sunny outside. The cherry blossoms have all just bloomed and buds are springing up on trees and everywhere. We even have tulips mysteriously popping up in the vegetable garden.

It was a glorious day at the school-- have I mentioned how much I adore working with all the kids?? On days like today, where my job is to be outside in the sun for half of my shift I really couldn't complain even if I wanted. I came home and grabbed Skip for a nice walk through the park and into downtown where we checked out a new coffee/ice cream/art house place. It was pretty cute and the owner was so friendly. She made us some tasty iced coffees for our walk back home. Okay, busted: I sampled the M&M cookies, too. Skip went all proper-like with a scone. (You did read that with a british accent, right?) It was cool to have a little mini-date with my guy before he had to work and it was just an awesome afternoon...

Until all the boys got home.

None of them were naughty, really... It was just all the talking over each other and interrupting at the dinner table that drove me batty! It was chaos in the form of a low, roaring din all afternoon/evening. Everyone has spring fever and they are acting like total mentals. I finally sent them to the playground for about 30 minutes to run off some energy. Got them all tucked into bed about 35 minutes ago. I don't know why I'm not well into a bourbon by now!? Maybe that should be my cue...

I do want to celebrate the successful- I think- completion of my damned thesis paper! And if anyone dares utter the phrase "Etruscan sarcophagi" to me EVER again, I will likely curl into a ball and start sobbing. It wasn't pretty, but I finished the thing and turned it in. I almost don't even care what my grade is at this point-- I'm just so glad it's done. One week from now and I'll be done for the semester-- hallelujah!

 Seriously, why is there not a drink in my hand yet??

I'll sign off with a photo roundup since I totally stiffed the ole blog last month. I was just too busy to blog! Wanna know what we did in April? Here are the parts of it I managed to catch on camera:

Owen & co. all packed up and on the ferry over to Cow Island in Casco Bay for the weekend. This was the first weekend in April and it was freaky cold. He tented on the beach and had a total blast, despite the weather.

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Okay, it's blurry, but you get the idea. This is Owen on the evening he came home from Cow Island. Sun- and wind-burned with a load of mischief in his eyes. I told you he had a blast!!

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This is the totally adorable baby mouse that Rocco passed on the stairs to the second floor one evening while Skip was away in Seattle. R walked right by Mr. Mousie and came to chat with me as I cooked dinner. He didn't even think to mention that he had seen a mouse until about 10 minutes later and, even then, he brought it up in an ever-so-casual statement. Something like, "Oh, yeah, I saw this totally cute mouse on the stairs..." Eeks. I pulled my pan off the stove for a minute, walked over to the stairs where, indeed, there was the mouse sitting right where R left him. I caught the l'il guy, set him free by the brook and returned to making dinner. All in a night's work... 

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Torching my signet ring in the studio

(No, I was not the one taking the picture. I was the one holding the torch!)

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The finished enamel signet ring

(pardon the filthy fingers-- that was a lot of sanding!)

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Brotherly Love... plus bugs.

Oscar & Rocco nuzzled up at the public library for the Traveling Bug Zoo guy. We saw stick bugs, tarantulas & a slew of other creepy crawlies. We held Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches, too! (One of them ran up Oscar's pant leg.)

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 Red's Dairy Freeze with the Grady Gang

a great way to end a meal with some of the coolest peeps ever

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Wayward Mallard ducks waddling around the driveway.

Oz was out there for a 1/2 hour trying to coax them out back to the brook- he was worried they'd get hit by a car

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Rocco: Man of Action & Mystery

This was a getup he donned a week or two ago for no apparent reason.

This boy still loves his dress up!

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Towering stack of May Day pancakes, courtesy of Oscar's culinary skills.

Family breakfast this morning was very nice, indeed.

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Ants & Amish Sweet Bread

Tube o' Ants
(it'll make sense much later in the post...
read on)
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Another May Day has come and gone... I have decided that May Day may well be one of my favorite days of the year. Each year I gather flowers to leave on our neighbors' porches. We deliver to our adjacent neighbors on either side and across the street. (Mostly the flowers are from our yard, which means daffodils. But if our crop is looking pathetic we make a run to the florist.) I absolutely love doing this... My favorite part is the stealth deliveries! I love quietly sneaking up to their porch, followed by the mad dash down their driveway and back to my own house. It's very fun!

Gloria-Across-the-Street thinks she knows it's me. I don't think she's ever actually caught me. But every May 1st, she at some point walks over and says something like, "You know, it's the funniest thing: I went out for my walk this morning and when I came back there were some beautiful flowers hanging from my door..." To which I say something like, "Oh, how nice!" She then says, "Thank you so much!" And I say, "I have no idea what you're talking about." She'll then say that, thanks to me, she always knows when it's May 1st. I tell her she's nuts. It's great.

May Day baskets are just one of those old traditions that I love. I refuse to let it die in today's age of e-mail and faxes. And this year I got a nice surprise... While preparing dinner that day, I saw Next-Door-Randy sneaking up to our back door by the deck... I didn't let her know I saw. (But did she really think she could out-sneak me?! Please. I'm a professional, Folks.) It was great fun for me to watch her carefully set the basket next to the door and then haul off through the woods back to her own house! I got the biggest smile on my face as I saw her running away. It's so fun to see that I've shared the cheer that delivering May Day baskets brings to me. Plus, it helps that we have just super cool neighbors to whom I love delivering flowers!

Above: a completely random video
taken in the car the other day.
Look how happy he looks- just jammin'
and watchin' the scenery pass by!
(turn up the sound if you want to hear
the Bob Marley, Mon...)
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In other news, the hot tub started leaking like a sieve a couple weeks ago. We refilled it and then, overnight, it looked like the picture below. Ugh. However, it turned out to be simple: an O-ring had cracked. It cost us 17c to replace it and the labor was warrantied. Phew. I also found out something interesting while Bruce from the spa shop was here repairing the tub... Back at the shop they have nicknames for their customers so they can keep them straight. I found out that I am "The Nice Lady." I hear that it's because I gave them cookies and homemade candies the last time they were here when they started up the hot tub. Awww.



I know that our weekly house cleaners also have nicknames for clients... When they are here I'll overhear them say things like, "Oh, I think I left the Pledge behind at Don't-Move-Anything-Andersons'..." Or "When I was cleaning the tub at Princess' house she scolded me for not using the right scrubber." I don't know what my nickname is with them. Probably not "The Nice Lady." Not because I'm not necessarily nice, but I'm sure we're probably known instead as "Messy-Office-Sullivans" or "Play-Doh-Carpet-Sullivans" or maybe just "Lola's House." They are in love with our goofy dog and probably spend half their time here playing with her. (Which doesn't bother me at all because we pay a flat rate anyway!)

Oh, yeah, in other news from the Money Pit... We found out two days ago that our leach field is failing and needs to be replaced. We are simply overjoyed to hear this news, of course. We found out that to dig up and replace the leach field, we need to move the kids' play set- which weighs like a kajillion pounds. Hmmm. (This seems like as good a time as any to plug Cedar Works play sets, right? "Built so sturdy, we have no idea how we're moving the thing!" haha) Well, in a glass-half-full approach, at least we discovered this before the sprinkler dudes came to run new sprinkler lines and before the back (dirt) yard was seeded... So that's good news! I'm choosing to be cheerful here. (Cheer is uplifting for the body. Hopefully for the mind, too...)

Rocco... caught after stuffing a whole Oreo in his mouth
(such refined manners)
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My clothesline is back up and doin' it's thang for the summer... Drying laundry faster than our lame, nine-year-old dryer does. Isn't nine years old the dryer equivalent of being a fifty-year-old? You're usually only about halfway through life at that age, aren't ya? I expected more from this dryer. I have to run it through two- sometimes three- cycles to get our clothes dry. It's pretty ridiculous. And now it's leaving scorch marks on everything. Medium-brown-colored scorch marks. It happened to one of Rocco's shirts that I absolutely love. A handmade one that I fully intend to keep forever... But now it has a scorch mark on the collar. Ughh. I've managed to get much of it out, but drying clothes just shouldn't be this much work! My favorite is the brown scorch mark on the backside of my white cotton undies. Good lord, please don't let me be in an accident wearing those and have the doctors thinkin' this gal's got skidmarks in her skivvies! Ay-yi-yi.

Anyhoo, moving on to the two advertised topics for this post...

Oscar and his ant buddies
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Ants... Oscar's ants for his ant farm have arrived! He has been waiting sooo patiently for them to come in the mail. Grandma and Papa gave him the ant farm for Christmas, but the ants don't come in it- you have to send in a coupon to claim your ants. Well, the catch is that they can't ship the ants if the night temperature in your region is below freezing. (Unless you want dead ants.) Since we live in Maine, it took quite a while for the green-light on shipping. BUT last week they arrived. We had to put them in the fridge for a while to get them sleepy (so they wouldn't bite me when I put them in the ant farm!) and now they are in their new home and are quite lively. They seem a little confused and not all of them made the journey through our postal system alive, but things look pretty good. They have been feverishly tunneling. They are also burying their dead in one corner of the farm. It's quite fascinating, really. Most importantly, Oscar is happy to have some "pets" of his own now!


And I have a can of Raid in the garage. For the escape attempts.

Now onto the Amish Sweet Bread. Okay, it's this stuff (for lack of a better word) that we got from Diana & family. It is kinda weird. She delivered it last week. It arrives as a Ziploc bag- full of a strange-looking, milky liquid. It came with instructions on how to cultivate it... Basically, we let it sit on the kitchen counter- unrefrigerated- and let it "fester" (that's my word- They didn't say that in the recipe) for ten days. You split it up on Day 10 and divvy it up to some of your friends the same way you received it. Then you bake what you've got for yourself and, apparently, it's delicious. If it doesn't kill you, it sounds interesting... I'll keep you posted. (If you don't hear from us after May 18th, send the authorities!)

So... who wants some Amish Fester Bread? I can give some to three people. (I may be delivering some to you whether you like it or not.) Or, as I warned Diana, I may very well be the dramatic end of the chain. We'll see. Wouldn't be the first time I killed a chain email or project! (I don't do that to be a killjoy. I just can't stand passing it on to my unsuspecting friends and family! Although, if they can eat it- and it's yummy- then that might be different...)

Okay. It's almost midnight and I need to get to bed if I am going to stay true to my new, up-at-6a regimen. I actually have been enjoying it. It's only been a few days, but I am feeling more energetic and getting a lot more done in the mornings! (We'll see how long it lasts.)

Owen & Oscar at the District Art Show on Monday.
Owen's piece in the show is the very top painting.
It's a dog- "kinda like Molly."
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Oscar's Keith-Haring-esque entry in the art show
The blue guy in the top row.
He's walking like an Egyptian. (Oscar says so.)
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