The best part about going to work is hanging out with my friends and talking. Today, though, I'm working with an older guy. He's terrific, really sweet and super nice, but I think he's turned his hearing aide off. The better to ignore me with, probably.

 

And that makes me think about my husband. He has these tiny, cute little ears, and I have a theory: the men in his family tend to marry harpies, and they have evolved smaller ears to make it easier to not hear them. My great-great-grandsons will probably just have little nubs on the sides of their heads.

One of the guys in our office is a concealed carry instructor. (Remember that I live here in Colorado, the Wild Wild West.) I asked him about signing up my twenty-year-old daughter, Valerie, for a class.

 

"She can take the class," he told me, "but she can't get a permit until she's twenty-one. And the first thing we teach sweet little girls like her is to overcome their aversion to hurting people."

 

Obviously he has never met my Valerie. She has no aversion to hurting people.

Here in Colorado Springs we've spent the weekend watching the snow fall. Since I've been working a lot, I took advantage of the time to partially excavate my home. It's funny to see the husband scurrying around, grabbing his treasures and dodging the vacuum. He hates it when I clean

I'm not a neat freak, not by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I've lowered my standards from an unattainable ideal to "no one has died from botulism or tetanus TODAY."  I'm far down the chart from Martha Stewart but, as long as the crew from "Hoarders: Buried Alive" don't knock, I figure I'm doing okay.

On Sunday my darling son, Kevin, told me that he had a science fair project due Wednesday. So off we went, scrambling around in a blizzard to acquire his supplies, including crickets. He wanted to measure the effect colored lights had on the insects.

 

On Monday I called from work (he had the day off from school) and asked him about the result of his experiments. He concluded, he said, that crickets are disgusting.

 

I'm so proud.

Today I bravely ventured forth on a terrifying journey...to the kitchen. I cleaned out the fridge. <Gulp>

Cleaning the fridge is always scary but intriguing. Has that thing in the back evolved sentience, or are the cold temperatures keeping it quiescent? Why does this thing have an expiration date of 2047? Is it not biodegradable? In my will, I'm going to have my great-great-grandchildren throw it away in 2048.

I can see them now: Yay! We got Granny's fridge! What the heck is THIS?!! OMG!

I just heard that a family who is very active in our church left because of a conflict with another member. That makes me very sad.

One of the good things about growing up Catholic was the fact that we had one church. There were three services, so if there was someone you didn't like, you could avoid them. That was your only option. You could talk to Father Brown, I suppose, but he was physically incapable of speaking a harsh word to anyone. He was the sweetest guy in the world.

You Protestants have too many choices.

I went shoe shopping with my son today. That involves going from store to store with me picking up shoes and him responding with mute horror. Apparently he has very specific tastes. Never mind that the shoes he's currently wearing are (literally) falling off his feet--his new shoes must fulfill some mysterious checklist, known only to the boy and unknowable to me. I am, after all, only his mother.

I could have bought 18 pairs of boots (and was sorely tempted to do so) in the time he took to pick out one pair of sneakers.

My daughter just said the only survivors of the zombie apocalypse will be pugs--because zombies only eat brains and, well, our pug is not the brightest bulb in the pack.

A new sporting goods store opened just south of Denver and my husband and I checked it out with some friends. Thankfully, my husband doesn't drag home dead animals and hang them in the garage. When he hunts and gathers, it usually involves pizza or fried chicken.

The store is really cool, though. I was checking out the crossbows when the (very handsome) clerk came over to help me. "Are you shopping for your husband?" he asked me. Apparently I do not look like someone who goes crossbow-hunting.