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There's this squirrel who's picking apples in our apple tree (I swear--I saw him pick one) and then running off somewhere with them. I didn't know that squirrels did that. The squirrels around here are pretty funny. You know those round, green, piney-smelling things that grown on some kind of tree? (Of course you don't, I'm not describing this well at all. But they're about the size of plums, are hard and inedible.) They keep leaving those things all over the place--we find them in our chairs, the railing of the deck, our front walkway. (The tree they come from is towards the back of the yard.) Then they'll be there for a few days, all round and green and hard, and one morning they'll suddenly be a pile of black crumbs. Like the squirrels are storing them and then coming back to eat them or something. At any rate, they are putting them all over in these practical joker places. Their favorite places are our plastic chairs. Now what kind of place is that to store something? (Ok, ok, so I've been known to file things in some pretty silly places, myself.) If you ask me, our squirrels are tricksters. I bet they scurry around giggling about where they put the funky green things. "Let's balance one on the railing, they'll spend hours trying to figure out why we put it there! Let's leave another in their chair again! Hehehehe!" Later.... The score is Koi-3, Ginkgo-0. I guess the good weather got to me, because I got it in my head that it would be a wonderful surprise for Mark if he came home and I'd done the chore he planned to do on Sunday. We need to catch the koi and put them in the tank in the basement for the winter, and have drained the pond down to just a couple feet so we could climb in and chase after them in chest waders. (Bear in mind that the pond is about 36 feet long by 18 feet wide and is an above ground pool.) So I planned to save Mark the trouble. And mostly, I wanted to play around in chest waders. So I changed clothes and got out our brand new chest-waders. Suspenders sold separately. We're talking about a set (pair, outfit?) of chest-waders big enough for a grown man. Big enough for Santa Claus, to be exact. And no suspenders. They weren't built, however to stay on even Santa Claus without the suspenders. I'm 5'6&1/2" tall and weigh 93 pounds. But I'm resourceful. There's a cinch string around the top (like in sweatpants, but higher), and since I'm so tiny, it fit around my neck, holding the waders up pretty well. I put a towel under the cord around my neck to pad it, and I was good to go. Hitching my rubber outfit up with both hands, I clomped off in my overlarge rubber boots (all part of the waders, in case you're not familiar with them--kinda like those bunny pajamas with the feet little kids are forced to wear. I hated those. But I love the waders. What woman wouldn't love chest-waders?) Then I clomped around preparing. Big tub outside the pool to use as a holding tank. Can of food to use as bait. Net. (I needed to borrow a lighter net and clomped over to Bob's to give the neighbors their afternoon entertainment. I was a sight. And I walked sort of like Quasimodo might have after riding a horse for eight hours.) Went to get the pool ladder to put it in so I'd be able to escape the pool afterwards. The ladder was so overgrown with vines that I had to give up. But I'm resourceful. I put one of our plastic chairs in the pool as a stepstool and was ready to be outsmarted by fish. Round one: Zen and the Art of Fish-Catching. I tossed some food in by me, sat down on the chair (the seat was about an inch above the water), and relaxed with the net dangling in the water to wait for the fish to adjust to my presence and notice the food. In defense of this strategy, it is relaxing and fun, and I almost caught a couple. The sunlight on the brownish-green water made me feel as if I was sitting at a lake in the wilderness. (Yes, I do have a rather easy time filtering out excess information. Like riots and thunderstorms and blue pool walls. Bob laughed at me when I told him I felt like I was at a lake.) Round two: Take the war to the fish. Run around the pool chasing the fish. After all, what fun are waders if you don't charge around in them? I almost caught one, so close that he jumped out of the net when I had him cornered. I soon tired of this, however. (The water is so cloudy that one sees a fish only by divine intervention.) (Bob: "Hey, I got some worms over here! You want to try using some to catch the koi with? *heh, heh, heh!*" Bob's fun.) Round three: The Harebrained Schemes Maneuver. Limit the playing field. I attempted to drag about twenty feet of alpine fencing through the pool to strand them in one small area. Plastic fence floats too well, and even with bricks weighing it down at intervals, it's so flexible that parts of it float up. The fish laughed at me. Bob, however, applauded the idea and offered to help after I'd been doing my Laurel and Hardy impression (single-handedly) for about half an hour. I told him we'd need Mark, too, and went to try the Zen method some more. When Mark got home we tried the fence maneuver some more and the fish laughed at all three of us. The Kodak moment that only lacked a camera (batteries were used up and recharging): Mark comes home to find his wife sitting on a chair in the pond, wearing big rubber chest-waders, relaxing with a Pepsi, legs straight out and floating on the water from the air in the pants and boots of the waders. He said it was hilarious, me decked out in giant waders, sitting in the pond, looking as nonchalant and content as if I was in my deck chair. I loved it--it feels so neat to put your legs up on nothing but water and not have to hold them up at all--those waders are my new favorite toy. (Mine exclusively, as it happens, because Mark is 6'2" and there is no way that cord is stretching around his neck. If, perchance, I did not love the waders, we'd go buy the suspenders. But they're mine. Mine, mine, mine!) And the camcorder moments (we don't own one) were any time I walked on dry land. Imagine a severely bow-legged Quasimodo flapping his arms around as he hammed it up pretending to be an ogre, and you're kind of close. (If you're really good, SilverStar, I might let you play with them, too. We can run around taking pictures of each other in giant rubber waders. What could be better?) Anyway, the whole thing was a farce from beginning to end. I spent a good bit of the day doing this (which is why I'm about to go to bed without being a good monkey and doing any computer chores) and it was pretty tiring. Unmitigated hell, dragging brick-laden, obstinate fence through the pond and so on. Right? Actually--try unholy glee. As I told Mark, I'm happiest when implementing a mad, harebrained scheme that has next to no chance of succeeding. "Katy knows this, and now you do, too," I said to Mark, grinning maniacally. (Katy and I grew up together.) I had so much fun that I was bouncing around and running around like a little kid for hours afterwards. (Not constantly, mind you, just on and off. Don't have enough energy to keep it up like I did when I was 6. I'm getting old, I tell you!) Mark took me out for eggrolls as a treat. Then we checked our mailbox and Laura's Pirates of Penzance video tape of the play she was in was here. Yea! So we watched that this evening. Laura is an incredible singer--wow! Then we watched t.v. and Letterman while I yawned like an exhausted little kid. Bedtime in a few minutes. [And the fish-farce had one success--we found out that we'd have to drain the pool more to have a chance of catching them, so we won't end up losing time doing that later. Chalk today up to R & D.]
You know, I just thought of something. Laura forwarded this cute thing to me about a couple who put romance back into their marriage (they'd been together for eons and it was going kinda flat, supposedly) by hiding these velvet hearts they'd got years ago at a state fair in all these weird places. Wrapped in plastic and hid in the peanut butter, even. I thought that was so cool. And I just realized that whether our marriage goes flat or not in another umpity-ump years, I can put those waders on and clomp up to bed in them. Those waders are like those velvet hearts for us. I think that would be cool. Either naked or with some lingerie, put the waders on and flop into bed and proposition Mark as if nothing was out of the ordinary. I still want to get some set of matching trinkets for us, though, because hiding stuff sounds fun, and the whole idea strikes me as rather romantic. But what should I get? A pair of small rubber dinosaurs? Better yet, tiny platypuses since we both adore them--they appeal to our sense of the absurd. Or maybe something mushy, like hunting for small, red velvet hearts like in the story? Or possibly matched spaceship miniatures of some sort? Tiny, green silk bananas? (We have this thing when we're really silly where we insert the words "green bananas" into songs we sing to on the radio while we're driving. "Take my green bananas and that's not nearly ALL... tainted bananas, oh-oh-oh-oh, tainted bananas!") Hmmm.... I like that idea--I'd even settle for yellow bananas. But where would I find some? I have a silk eggplant refrigerator magnet (I'm nuts for neat fridge magnets), so maybe if I search, I'd actually find bananas somewhere. I can just see this spurring a nation-wide hunt. "Help me find small, silk bananas. I need them for a future crisis in our marriage which I do not foresee." Heck, why not? If you see any, please let me know. It can be The Great World-Wide Tiny Banana Hunt. Boy, do I need sleep, or what? G'night.
"Love is like pi--natural, irrational, and very important."
But we only met yesterday. Well that was when time began. --Errol Flynn
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