My mom sent me this photo under the above title, and it cracked me up so I will share it with you.
I showed this to Isaac and he understood the problem right away. "That's a POSSUM!" he said with a bright smile. "They have more teeth than any other mammal!" Seems he met one at school one time and even got to pet it. I met one myself one time, too, ironically in the city. One dark night on our porch Lena dog was battling it. I didn't know what it was, until it literally played possum. Lena set it down saying, "Huh? You died?" and it got up and ran away. You would think the bald, prehensile tail and the little hands, to say nothing of the pointy face, would tip these people off that it's NOT a cat, but… oh well.
Life here has been 100% frantic lately. It's my new little project of renovating our extra house and becoming a land lady. It's on top of all the normal insanity around here, and it's been especially overwhelming this week. The kitchen is going in, the carpet is coming out and new is going in, the fridges have been swapped between the houses, the lease has been haggled over ad nauseum, the tenants are packing their stuff to move in, and a week from now this will all be done (please lord). We will be landlords and the constant problem of having two enormous mortgages and double utilities will be reduced. The mortgage crisis has slammed Cleveland extra hard and now, at least, we can get out of the market and forget about the whole thing until such time in the future the economy rights itself. (Might be a while…) Now one need only refinance to get the mortgage payments to an amount under the rent income. Negative cash flow go away!
Elias can now say "baby!" and "cookie!" in standard English. He also has upgraded his "yeah" to "yesh!" which is beyond cute. Speaking of beyond cute, can I tell you that he feeds his trucks and tucks them into little beds? I mean… seriously…
We let the spider and the little toads go, and got a fish tank with two mollies and one male beta. We had a rough start with all of it, and I handled the whole thing very badly, not doing research or advance prep or thinking it through all that well. So one of the mollies died– RIP Silveryback. Isaac insisted that he be buried with a cross to mark his grave, and we said a few words. Goldyback and Bill (the beta) have been carrying on stoically. We also got some water conditioning drops and some stress treatment and a nice pump. The two remaining fish seem to be doing great, although Bill chases Goldyback around constantly. We need to get Goldyback some sort of hidy hole because Bill seems to feel that the whole tank is his territory. (Beta's aren't supposed to be aggressive to fish of other types.) But it's a new hobby, pretty much launched. We have three new little toads that Isaac caught the other day, just for old times' sake.
Other than that, we have a French girl coming to stay with us for ten days starting on Monday. A guest and sort of a helper-outer. We'll see how it goes. She's supposed to be pretty nice, so I have long-term designs on getting her to be our au pair next summer. More on that as it develops. In the meantime… the house is a complete mess after a week of running through and dropping things off, picking things up, and running out again. Or on the phone for hours coordinating things while Elias runs amok. Ugh. I'm exhausted, but there are many things to clean before i rest.