Boo to You!

When I was a little girl, I used to think there were alligators under my bed.  My sister and I slept in matching antique twin iron beds, and they were far up off the ground, so you had to hop pretty high to get into them at night.  The alligators didn't live under there during the day, you know.  Only at night, when the lights were out and little girls were supposed to be asleep.

I don't know if our parents, or a mean babysitter put this thought into my head, but I was always convinced that if I put my foot down, or let it stray outside the covers and dangle over the side of the bed, it would be bitten off by an angry alligator and all I'd be left with was a bloody stump!

I remember too, that in the darkness, as I would lay there and think about the monsters under the bed, I would also see things flying through the air above me.  If you looked real hard into the pitch black dark, you could see these tiny little red things darting back and forth real fast and I just knew they were something sinister.  Like if you put your hand up into the blackness, these little red things would hit against your arms and hand with little stinging bites.  I don't know for sure what they were.  More than likely they were the result of extreme eye strain and an over-active imagination, but next time you're laying in bed in a totally dark room, try it and see if you can spot them.

And heaven forbid if the closet door should remain open at bedtime.  Don't even get me started there!  Have you ever stared long enough into a dark, open closet and imagined the contents manifesting themselves into the most gosh-awful monsters ever set forth upon the face of the earth?  Well, I have, and then some!  Hard to believe an innocent coat can become Dracula with fangs dripping blood, just waiting to come out and bite your neck.

As a kid and young adult, I watched all the most horrifying scary movies and read the most horrendously gory books.  I loved being scared and was thrilled when a new horror film came out and we got to go and see it at the theater.  I read every Stephen King and Dean Koontz book there was.  Now, you couldn't DRAG me to a horror movie.  And I can't even get two pages into a book by Stephen King these days without slamming it shut and throwing it out.  I just don't have the tolerance for any of that any more.  I have nightmares for days just watching one episode of the latest horror series on television.  And zombies?  Forget-about-it!  No way, no how!  I can't endure anything about zombies.  If one knocked on my door, I swear I'd just die dead away, right on the spot.  He wouldn't even have to kill me first, I'd just lay down and die before he had the chance!

An occasional ghost story, I can handle.  I watch a few on tv now and then, and they aren't so bad.  As long as there's no blood and guts, I can usually watch to the end.  I might be a little jumpy the rest of the night and sleep with the lights on, but I can usually endure it.

So, here's to another Happy Halloween!  Hopefully yours will be zombie-free and only as scary as you want it to be.  One tip though:  chocolate before bed gives you the most awful nightmares.  I'm speaking from experience here, so stick to the non-chocolate candies before you fall asleep on Halloween night!  You'll be glad you did!

A Night to Remember

Stinky Boy

It was Friday evening and Hubby and I were home celebrating Dudley's 3rd birthday.  It had been raining most of the day, and we had the front door open, enjoying the night.  All three of us were in the living room and Dudley was running back and forth from his toy basket, bringing toy after toy to his Daddy who was flinging them here and there in a rambunctious game of fetch.  Dudley would pause at the front door occasionally, listening to the rain or watching the fireflies bounce around in the wet grass.  Every once in awhile he'd run out onto the porch on alert, barking at some unseen critter and we'd tease him and call him back in to keep playing.

We had been visiting via text with the man we bought Duds from three years ago, telling him how good Dudley looked and how happy and energetic he was.  We were snapping photos and sending them off so he could see how big Dudley had gotten and how handsome he'd become.  Proud parents bragging about their adorable son!  All of a sudden Dudley bolted out onto the porch again and like a flash he was shooting down the steps and I just knew he was after some terrible creature of the night!

No sooner had I stepped out the screen door when I heard this incessant squeaking and chattering and I was just in time to see the back end of a big, black skunk, tail high in the air and Dudley's face right in the line of fire!  In slow motion, I saw Dudley jump into the air like he'd been shot, shaking his head all around and I knew right then and there he was a goner.  He'd been lucky once before when he first encountered a skunk in our front yard.  That skunk was a lot friendlier than this one.  When Dudley ran up to smell its butt, he didn't do anything but chatter and squeak and run away.  This skunk, however, was not so kind.  He apparently wasn't in any mood to deal with the floppy faced bulldog that had just come charging out of the quiet little house on the hollow!

Dudley's face was all scrunched up and his eyes were glued shut but somehow he managed to stagger up the porch steps and right into the living room, stunned.  While it all seemed to be happening in slow motion, I'm sure it really occurred in a matter of seconds.  All three of us were in total shock.  Dudley was standing in the middle of the living room floor and Hubby and I were just frozen to the spot wondering if he really did get skunked or maybe he just got scared.  The smell hadn't hit us yet, but then all of a sudden like some noxious invisible cloud of doom BOOM!  The terrible onion-y smell enveloped us and were were covering our noses and went into major panic mode! 

Hubby picked Dudley up in his arms and ran into the bathroom and dropped him in the tub.  He started running cold water all over his face to flush out Dudley's eyes, which were still glued shut and red.  Hubby was yelling for me to get the soap, get the towels, close the door, look on the internet to see what we're supposed to do, Hurry!  Hurry!  Hurry!

I found a site that said to rinse his eyes with saline solution real good, so I ran into the bathroom and grabbed a bottle and while Hubby held his eyes open, I poured it on.  Then back to the internet again to another site that said to use baking soda, Dawn soap and hydrogen peroxide on him to kill the stink.  We didn't want a bleached bulldog, so we skipped the hydrogen peroxide.  The site also advised Hubby should be wearing gloves while doing all this, but that advice came way too late since he was already elbow deep in skunk water!  Luckily the spray had only hit Dud's in the face, so surprisingly after his bath, he didn't hardly stink at all.  

Unfortunately we weren't so lucky with the house.  It stunk to high heaven!  We couldn't open the doors or windows because then the smell from the front yard would blow in.  We turned on all the ceiling fans and closed the doors to rooms where the smell hadn't reached yet and hoped for the best.  I googled some ways to get skunk smell out of your house and came across a blog from some poor woman who's dog had not only gotten sprayed by a skunk, but it had killed it and brought it into the house!  Poor thing.  She said one thing that worked for her was to pour apple cider vinegar into bowls and place them all around the house.  The vinegar would absorb the odor and then the next day you could pour it all down the drain.  So, I grabbed every bowl we had out of the cupboard and poured the vinegar in and we put them in every room of the house. 

The rest of the night was just awful.  Our nostrils burned with the smell and our eyes were watery and red.  We put Dudley in his pen in the laundry room and closed ourselves in our bedroom but the smell just seemed to be everywhere.  I kept thinking maybe we should just go outside and sleep in our truck or check into a hotel.  How would we ever be able to sleep?  We tried putting Vicks vapor rub up our nostrils, but even that didn't keep the skunk smell out.  I was longing for a gas mask or something, anything to help us breathe clean air!  It was a long and restless night.

The next morning, I was surprised the vinegar seemed to be working and the house didn't seem to reek as bad as it had before.  Encouraged, I let Dudley out of his pen and he plopped himself down at my feet and looked up at me with his beautiful little eyes as if questioning whether all that really happened or was it all just a bad dream?  I went around the house pouring out all the bowls of vinegar, scrubbed the tub, washed all Dudley's  bedding, opened all the windows and doors and started cleaning like a mad woman.  The only thing was, you'd walk outside for a minute and as soon as you came back in the house, the smell would hit you like a ton of bricks.  We were just getting used to it, it wasn't really going away!  Oh no!

I decided to go into town to try and find something we could use to get the stink out.  $95 later, I was back home with every odor-absorbing gel, spray, liquid, powder or candle I could find.  I sprinkled baking soda concoctions all over the carpets, sprayed down all the furniture, washed the bedding and all the laundry.  Two days later and the smell is still there, but it's getting fainter.  I guess we just have to wait for it to wear off and hope and pray no one comes over to visit because we certainly couldn't let them in!

Needless to say, none of us will ever forget Dudley's 3rd birthday.  And no, he didn't learn his lesson because the very next day when he heard the dryer make a squeaking noise, the first thing he did was fly through the kitchen and straight out the front door searching for that black and white stinker from the night before!  Good grief!

Springtime 2015

The first day of Spring and my favorite part of welcoming this season is the sight of all the daffodils on my drive to work!  We live out in the country and their are thousands of daffodils bobbing their little yellow heads all along the sides of the roads.  There are patches of them in fields, peeking out at the edge of woods, along fence rows and even in the ditches.

There are several old homesteads on my way into work that are long since gone, but the daffodils still remain.  You can see where daffodils line the foundation of an old historic home that burned down ages ago and just picture what it must have looked like when the house was still standing.  I like to think of the sweet woman that probably planted those bulbs, bending down in her calico dress with her white apron.  Her hair pinned up on top of her head, or hanging down her back in one long braid. How much pride she must have felt every Spring when her labor of love bloomed all around her beautiful home.

One site where a house once stood is all overgrown with tall grass and bushes, some trees scattered here and there in a big open field.  You'd never believe a house once graced the spot, except for the daffodils that are lined up perfectly straight along both sides of what once was the walkway to the front of the house.  They still pop up every year, even though the walkway and house are long gone.

Some times you can see a huge field of daffodils just scattered everywhere and then on across the road they start up again in a ditch and off into another field.  I assume the flood waters carried the bulbs across the road in one of our many storms.  It's so pretty.

It won't be long now and the redbud trees will be blooming along the sides of the roads, their bright pink and purple buds letting the other trees know it's time to start leafing up and making everything green again.  I love Spring!