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A spooky ghost story (sort of)
There I was on a dark and stormy night, doing dishes by the light of the moon. Tree branches cast long shadows across my countertops and scratched their long bony fingers across my soapy hands. Dish after dish, I soaped and rinsed. I set them beside me on the little rickety wooden dish rack to dry.
From time to time the water in the sink would stop draining properly and a pool of murk would rise up from the depths below. Dried bits of cheese and broken spaghetti noodles would swirl and swish in the dirty water. This didn’t scare me. Our plumbing is bad and I am used to drainage problems.
Just a quick surge of power from the garbage disposal would be all I needed to grind up whatever was blocking the water from draining and I’d be back in business washing dishes and hurrying off to bed.
It was getting cold and my warm bed called me. I could feel a chill creeping up from the linoleum floor, across my bare feet and up my night dress to the little hairs on the back of my neck. Brrrrr. I hated doing dishes at night.
I leaned over and flipped the switch of the garbage disposal and immediately a loud grinding gurgle errupted from below the sink. A giant bubbling mountain of gray water shot from the drain towards the ceiling. The dish I was holding flew out of my hand and shattered on the floor. Cups and saucers clattered and broke in all directions. I staggered backwards, blocking my face from the spray of warm greasy water and tried to get away.
No matter how hard I tried, I could not escape. The floor was slippery. I lost my footing and fell, nearly knocking myself out on the corner of my red refrigerator. The water continued to spray out of my sink and soon I was drenched to the bone.
A voice spoke from beneath. It seemed to be coming from behind the cupboard where the garbage disposal itself was housed. The doors rattled and my windows shook.
“I am the ghost of your garbage disposal,” it cried in a high pitched whine. “I have come to vipe your vindows!”
Wait. That’s not how it went. Scratch all that. Scratch everything except the part about where gray water shot out of my drain. That really happened. I wasn’t doing dishes at night and it didn’t shoot all the way to the ceiling but this did really happen to me and it scared the crap out of me.
Apparently, our pipes are old and there is a giant clog. When you try to run your garbage disposal with a giant clog, it repels all the water in the opposite direction. This may be the direction of the person who is washing dishes. It can be quite frightening to someone who is not expecting it.
Our sink is out of commission. It’s been that way since Saturday. Toby dumped some very strong super duper plumbing chemicals down it and all that did was skunk Baby Bug and I out of the house. At this time I am at my mom’s in the sticks because the smell of sulfur was so strong, I couldn’t go five feet near my kitchen. I was afraid for poor Baby Bug’s brain cells. We are staying away until it is fixed.
Toby spent all day yesterday negotiating with our landlord and I think things will be fixed by tomorrow. (Toby is my hero.) From what I hear, they are ripping up the kitchen floor and replacing great lengths of pipe. This could be exciting for us since I am inviting my whole crazy family to my house tomorrow to go trick or treating.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
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Big Fun for Little Bug
When did Halloween start being so fun? I’m supposed to hate Halloween! Laugh if you want but I have had a deep fear of vampires since I was eight years old. I watched some dumb movie at my neighborhood friend’s house down the street and I’ve had nightmare ever since. Sometimes still to this day, I will pull the covers up to my neck because I hate the feeling of cold air on my exposed neck. Don’t even get me started on how much I can’t stand scary commercials on tv. I’ve been known to just plain not watch tv for the whole month of October.
But now? I love Halloween! Maybe I should say I love the celebration of harvest and fall. I have fallen in love with pumpkins. They are so pleasing. What’s not to love! They are round and orange (one of my favorite colors) and you can carve faces into them. And then, the best part: you can throw them away! I love that. I really don’t like boxes of seasonal stuff that I have to find a place for. Ask my family. Not having a place for everything is almost as scary to me as my neck being exposed on a dark night.
Baby Bug and I went to the pumpkin patch on Saturday. It was SO fun! I know it was kind of expensive but I shelled out twenty bucks and we did everything. We rode the wagon, we pet the sheep and the goats and a funny little hairy pig in the petting zoo. We ate shaved ice (green snow) and watched a pumpkin being blasted out of a cannon to a hill far away and smash into a thousand pieces. We ran around the corn maze that wasn’t really a maze but more of a labyrinth and examined every single dirt clod, rock and twig. It was the best thing for us. It was just so nice to be outside breathing air that doesn’t smell like a campfire for a change.
Of course we couldn’t leave without a pumpkin, even though we already have three at home from my Dad’s garden. I told myself not to buy another pumpkin but they called to me with their curly stems and big round tummies. I couldn’t just leave them there to rot. So we left with a big fat round one.
On the way to the car I had to carry Baby Bug on one hip and the pumpkin on the other. “It’s a good thing Mommy has big hips,” I said to Baby Bug as I hoisted her up. Then being the minor bird that she is Baby Bug said, “Good thing Baby has hips.” That gave me a laugh. She’s so funny. She copies everything I say. I should record her one of these days. I think I could get her to say the Gettysburg address if I wanted her to.
That night we carved one of our pumpkins and I introduced Baby Bug to the concept of trick or treating. She’s eaten cookies almost every day of her life but candy is a foreign concept. Let me just say, she caught on pretty quick. I don’t need to worry about her not knowing what to do with her special knitted pumpkin purse that Bethany Actually made for her. I think by Wednesday she will be showing other kids how it’s done.
If spending a whole day at the pumpkin patch and then learning about candy wasn’t spoiling her enough, I decided to take her to the big mall on Sunday for their annual “Pumpkins and Pancakes” breakfast. It’s such a great event. For the cost of admission (which I don’t know what is because we have connections and got in free) you get a gourmet breakfast (catered by the same restaurant who catered my wedding), fun dancing time with a real dee jay (think chicken dance and the limbo), fun with a bazillion other kids in costumes and CRAFTS!!!
Baby Bug and I LOVE crafts. I was worried she wasn’t big enough to really participate, since all the other kids were twice her size and there were open containers of glue and paint and gooey stuff, but she was fine. She sat right there next to the big kids and painted and made her own owl puppet as if she did this sort of thing every day.
One mother turned to me and said, “Do you get a lot of comments from people about how small she is and how she can walk already?”
“Sure,” I answered. “But that’s not nearly as fun as the looks I get when she says the whole alphabet and then counts to fourteen.” Moms love me when I tell them that. I’m such a show off. But she can. She’s a nut like that.
I’m sure I’ll pay for this someday when Baby Bug is the littlest in her class and she comes crying home to me because all her friends can play on the monkey bars but she can’t reach them because the ladder is too low. I know because I was the littlest one once. It’s not all fun and games being small.
I thought Baby Bug would be so afraid when we went to the big event at the mall. There was loud music and big kids everywhere in scary costumes. I thought she’d be clinging to me for dear life, afraid of being stepped on. But nope. She wanted to be right there in the middle of it all. She’s like a chihuahua, she doesn’t even know she’s little.
Phew! I need to stop having so much fun. These posts are taking me forever to write.
