Tales from the Shark Tank

Most people, if they are locked in the bathroom, have done it themselves and on purpose. I did not. I got locked in by a malfunctioning doorknob that detached itself from its stem, so that the mechanism did not turn the little tongue that latches in the door. I was on the inside, very grateful that I’d taken my clothes in with me when I went to shower, and my son was on the outside. This turned out to be a Very Good Thing(tm).

First I had him send a small screwdriver under the door, which I used to disassemble the knob. That’s how I figured out what was wrong with it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it right. So I had my boychick get a big screwdriver, put it in the mechanism, and attempt to turn it. No luck; he hasn’t the hand strength.  So I bade him get the phone, and talked himi through calling his best friend’s mom.  He got her voice mail, and left a message that sounded like he was narrating a scene of doom and disaster.  Have I mentioned that this kid loves to dramatize anything?  But really, I was enormously proud of him; he’s never dialed the phone or spoken to anyone without an adult to preceed him, and he managed it quite well.
Next I tried to go out the window. The screen came out very easily, but that was the end of my success. I suppose I’d have fit had I been willing to dive out the window headfirst, but for any sort of climb not calculated to do more harm than good, my dimensions exceed window tolerances. I’m still stuck. Our son, though, worried that the attempt was dangerous, had brought the small step-ladder around and put it under the window. It wasn’t high enough for me to put a foot on (which would have made window-egress much more feasible), but it was high enough that he could climb up and reach the window to hand me things. Now I could get tools larger than those that could fit under that dratted door!

I had him hand me the phone through the window. No luck reaching anyone. I got my husband somewhat later, who said he didn’t know what he could do anyway.  (Oh, get and axe out of the garage and commit an act of demolition?  No, maybe not such a good idea….)  Ok….I had my son bring me a large screwdriver; he couldn’t find the hammer, but my shoe was a good fake. I dismantled the hinges. Trouble is, I still lacked leverage to knock the door off same toward the inside of the room, and when I told my son to throw himself at it as hard as he liked, it didn’t work. Ah, but now I had a large screwdriver and a small one. A twist here, a yank there using the handle as a hook, and the latch assembly gave. Freedom beckoned. I put the hinges back together before I accepted the invitation, lest the door fall on the head of an unwary child, either human or feline, and sallied forth into the rest of the house. And you know, all I could think of as I tried to figure out how to fit myself out the window was that if it succeeded, our one bathroom house would be a no bathroom house until it was fixed…and that doing so would probably require going back in through that same window.

I’ve been running around like acephalous poultry for awhile now, starting with the wedding in South Bend and going on through the graduation (which was really lovely) and then home to do a mad scramble to pick up someone else’s dropped ball.  But now the paperwork for that last has been sent off, and there’s nothing I can do until at least noon tomorrow.  I’ve taken my son to the library (at times an every-other-day expedition), but came home to close windows against the impending storm.  That was about two hours ago, and the storm is still “impending”.  I can hear thunder at frequent intervals, and the wind is gusting.  The day has darkened to twilight a good four hours ahead of the usual time.  The temperature, already low for summer around here, has dropped like a rock – but it’s all just teasing.  It had done all that by 3:00, and now at 5:00 still hangs there like a hovering wet doom.  The little guy, having watched a train video three times in succession, is now building his own train set.  I actually have two spare minutes to rub together.   The dishes need done, and I’ll go attend to them, but in a moment.  It isn’t something I have to jump up and do this very minute, as the writing I sent off had to be done the very minute I got out of bed this morning.

So I’m looking around.  The house has a good scattering of clutter about the floor, which I hate to admit is normal for me but is.  Mrs. Good Housekeeping I will never be.  I could be picking up now, of course, but instead I’m blogging.  There are still boxes stacked in the livingroom from our move.  That is a serious embarrassment; they were stacked there almost a year ago in mid August and remain untouched.  The yard needs to be mowed quite desperately; it needed it before I went to South Bend, neither my husband nor I has had time to attend to it since (I wasn’t home) and this afternoon, when I could have, the weather made it seem ill-advised at best.   But all in all, it’s not so bad.  It’s peaceful, and the view outside the windows is beautiful even in the gloom of a coming storm.  I had never thought a field of corn particularly pretty, but you know, it is.  It dances there, as the wind blows by, and with the time to look rather than shooting past in a car I can see the grace and shades of green.  Some of it is already beginning to tassel, out toward the middle of the field.  The stuff at the edges probably never will; for some reason that outside row is almost always stunted.  But it’s still green, still pretty, and when it is cut come fall and left to lie the deer will eat it just the same.

It’s also a wonderful cat-jungle.  Sophia looks a good deal like a panther seen through the wrong end of a telescope, and loves to stalk into the corn and crouch there.  I can see her because I know where she went; if I hadn’t watched her walk out there I’d never find her.  If I take my eyes off her and lose my place, I  have a hard time indeed to find that smoke-grey curve against the grey and brown of the soil, especially when the shape of her is broken up by the corn stalks.  She’s inside now, curled up on the guest bed in the attic, staying in out of the rain with her kitten.  Both of them have an appointment to lose their kitten-making apparatus on Thursday.  Once they’ve healed from that, Tornado gets to start learning the joys of Outside.  She’s more than ready, and Sophia wants to take her.  Mama goes out, then sits outside the screen door and calls baby, who then attempts to dismantle the screen-cloth with her needle sharp kitten claws.  That gets discouraged with the Spray Bottle of Doom, but Kitten-girl is not a rocket scientist and it sometimes takes several good squirts before it registers on her radar.  Of course most toddlers take some distracting to turn them from an undesirable activity, so I don’t know why I expect more of a tiny cat.  Maybe because it’s that even though she’s only about half the size of her mama, she’s lost her baby roundness.  Grey with faint tiger-striping and black with a pale grey undercoat, side by side, they really do look like a grey-scale study.

And that’s what I’ll watch as I do the dishes.  This is the time of day when the cats haunt the kitchen.  Sophia will curl up under the edge of the cabinets near where I stand, and Tornado will jump and bat at my feet.  The rain still hasn’t come, and I don’t think it will now.  Tomorrow I’ll have to water the garden, since the sky wasn’t kind enough to do so today. There’s nothing momentous at all in this evening.  That suits me just fine.

Saturday last I performed the wedding of some friends of mine, having reconstructed my dress for the event the night before.  I’ll have to do it again; it was a fast-and-dirty job, and the zipper is now a little higher at the top than the neckline.  But I won’t have to take the entire thing apart, just a couple of inches on either side of the zipper and the zipper itself, to move it down.  No sweat.

Meanwhile, I’ve been in South Bend since, staying with our godson while his mom is away on a her honeymoon.  He’s 13 now, and he’s a really great kid.  I get the feeling he keeps his head down at school because he doesn’t feel like he fits in real well, but who of us did?  And his grades came yesterday – straight A’s.  No suprise at all, which is very cool.  That was worth interrupting a honeymoon with a phone call, and I did.

But with a teen and an 8 year old, time to write has been very thin on the ground – still is, in fact.  I’ve been up here on my laptop checking e-mail and attending to minor business for half an hour, and it’s time to go downstairs again and relieve the teen from the attentions of my son.  He’s infinitely patient, plays games with J. at the little guy’s level, but there’s a limit to how much I will presume on that.  So I’m off again.  I’ll be home tomorrow, off again on Friday for that residency graduation I keep crowing about, and then, having been away from my beloved husband for an entire week, home again on Saturday.  Not that there aren’t things I could attend to in Indy, but most of them are going to wait.  I’m ready to be home, I am.