When the cat’s away, the mice will bring their freakout chambers out into the light of day

And so this is what we came home to this afternoon, after leaving the GG home alone for a few hours. With Jimi Hendrix reverberating throughout the Landfill. (I need to say that I did not take that photoooo. It was taken by jcb sometime during the last year and I cadged it off his iPad tonight. I have been exclusively using my iPhone for my camera since about last June and it can do some neat things but it cannot do what jcb did in this photooo.)

Anyway. It has been a rather surreal weekend. The GG was scheduled to attend the Saturday night Ann Arbor Folk Festival performances with Dogmomster but she came down with a killer cold that day. Hill Auditorium would not be a good place for anyone with a cold to hang out for five hours, not to mention passing along the virus to, well, the GG and therefore probably me. So she very prudently begged off. But that left the GG without a date and I am not a good folk concert date. Fortunately, he foraged around a bit and Sarah Palin GrandmotherTrucker agreed to accompany him.

She stayed the night and then accompanied Mouse and me on a fabric store boondoggle over to Haberman’s in Royal Joke. This little trip was one of Mouse’s Christmas gifts and we have had one heckuva time scheduling it because I work weekdays and Mouse often works weekend days and then there’s the whole issue of snow and the last thing I want to do on a day off is to break my neck traversing a bunch of snow-covered freeways to the Megalopolis area and back. Bumpity clunking over to Megalopolis is not my favo-rite drive on any day but today the skies were clear and the roads were dry and so we did it.

I was not into fabric shopping myself today. Mouse is very very particular about color and texture and fiber and drape and whatever and I felt that it would be best if I just left her alone to make her choices, so mostly I sat there and did today’s NYT xword on my phone (extra fun horoscope zodiac signs theme with rebuses and all — yers truly is the year of the snake — hssssssssst!). And then. I got the brilliant idea that I could do the little bit of grokkery shopping that I needed to do today at the Holiday store down the street a couple blocks! Yes! That did the trick. I knew that I would be about at the end of my shopping rope by the time we got back to the Planet Ann Arbor. And then, for good measure, we stopped at Holiday a *second* time *after* we were finished with Haberman’s because Mouse, who had not eaten anything much all day, needed a snack.

And then, we got back and, after we managed to get the GG to at least tone down the music a bit, I threw together a lasagna and some related stuff just in time for none other than Sam the Archaeologist and her accomplice jcb (who took the photoooo) to arrive. We ate lasagne and whined for a while and they are now on the road again, heading back down to Hotlanta. They were not scheduled to hit The Planet Ann Arbor until tomorrow but apparently there’s some sort of snowmageddon heading our way on Tuesday (my phone weather apps are *already* showing a severe weather alert for it), so they are wise to get on down the road now, so that they don’t get stuck in some hotel somewhere along the way for a few days without power or water. I mean, I can’t even do without a shower for even one measly day and we won’t even talk about what can happen to toilets under those circumstances… We’ll see what we really get though.

Oh. But. I was gonna end on that but then I remembered. There was also a tragedy in our neighborhood this weekend. The twice a week local newspaper arrived this morning and the headline was something like, “1 dead, 1 critical in fire”. I began reading the article and realized to my sheer utter horror that the house was on a street just a couple blocks from the Landfill! And if I had been out and about just a bit earlier that morning, I’d’ve probably heard sirens or smelled smoke or, well, I dunno. As it was, I walked to the farmer’s market that morning and got out a little late, after they had the fire under control. Very sad, not to mention spooky. Made me actually almost appreciate the fact that we have something like four hard-wired smoke alarms within about a four foot radius, even though they go off whenever it rains extra hard or somebody takes a shower without turning on the bathroom fan.

Drive safely and make sure your smoke alarms are in good working order.

Love,
KW

2 Responses to “When the cat’s away, the mice will bring their freakout chambers out into the light of day”

  1. Margaret Says:

    That’s very sad–we have about 8 alarms and they are so annoying when they need batteries. Chirp, chirp, chirp and I can never tell which one it is!

  2. Karen F. Says:

    I think with the 3 we have being “hard-wired”, if one chirps due to low battery, they ALL chirp! Even more annoying is inserting the wrong brand of battery… “chirp-chirp-chirp” until the right brand goes in. So, I wrote the brand name in Sharpie on the outside of the detector (can’t read the teeny molded-in printing on the case, so ya do whatcha gotta do!).