Grow tomatoes, they said

Back when we first moved into our house, and I was trying to build a garden that wouldn’t be raided by wildlife, people told me: “Plant tomatoes. The animals won’t touch them.” I didn’t plant tomatoes. I don’t like tomatoes. I like lots of things made from tomatoes: pizza sauce, tomato soup, marinara, but an actual tomato has just the right texture to make me flinch when I bite into it. I’m a freak, I know, but there’s just something about the feel of a tomato that makes my tongue want to retreat down my throat.

Instead, I spent lots of time fortifying my garden. The effort paid off. I made my garden impervious to rabbits and groundhogs, etc., just in time to abandon gardening in order to take up the hobby of raising children. Through all the years my garden lay fallow, I took pride in knowing herbivores could not get at the various weeds filling the space.

This year, my wife took an interest in gardening. Men familiar with wives will understand this means she did a lot of pointing while I did an equal amount of digging around in dirt. The pointing was crucial; without it, I may not have understood which dirt I was to play in.

In our refurbished garden, we kept it simple, planting only cucumbers and peas. The cucumbers went wild, overrunning the peas as well as the garden fence. It’s a good thing we didn’t plant tomatoes in there; they wouldn’t have stood a chance against the invading cucumber hordes.

Cucumber plants going over the wall to carry their conquest into the back yard proper.

My wife likes tomatoes. She likes them a lot. So, we planted some tomatoes in a pot on our deck. They prospered well, until the fruit started to turn red. Then we began to find bites taken out of them. The Internet cast the blame at squirrels. The Internet casts blame for a lot of things at squirrels. I’m sure some of it is justified, but I bet some of it is thrown at them based solely upon reputation. Squirrels have a PR problem.

I wrapped chicken wire (or as the chickens prefer: flightless bird wire) around the pot. The depredations continued unabated. A friend suggested it must be birds attacking our tomatoes, but I’ve seen the mouths on the birds around our place and I doubt they’d leave teeth marks.

One day I noticed movement inside the wire. As I came closer, the movement noticed me. Up the wire scampered a dirty little red-faced chip monk. He leapt from the wire to the deck railing and was gone before I could do more than stomp my foot and yell at him to get a job.

What a nice chap. He left half of the only ripe one for us.

We slid the pot away from the railing and removed the accommodating wire. The thievery continues unabated.

To date, the tomato arithmetic has worked itself to a ratio of one tomato for us, one tomato for Chip. I guess that makes us Nature’s perfect socialists.

Conversations with my wife: Vitamins

Back when we were first preparing for stay-at-home orders, we, like many people, scrambled to make sure we had a good supply of the family’s prescription medications. On one of her trips to the pharmacy, my wife picked up a bottle of daily vitamins for each of us. I hadn’t been in the habit of taking general vitamin pills, but it wasn’t a bad idea to keep the levels up, with pathogens potentially lurking around every corner.

A contrast between the bottle of Women’s vitamins and the bottle of Men’s vitamins was immediately apparent. I thought perhaps her pills were larger than mine, because maybe the vitamins a man needs are smaller than the vitamins a woman needs. I don’t know how big an individual vitamin is. Or maybe she needs extra supplements to give her the strength to deal with me in isolation.

A vitamin gap?

These notions were dispelled when I read the labels side by side. Her bottle had 200 daily doses, while my bottle held only 120.

I found interesting the theory that I would not need to be kept in optimal health for as long as she would.

ME: Your vitamin bottle is bigger than mine.

WIFE: So it is.

ME: Yours has 80 more pills in it that mine does.

WIFE: Yeah, I know.

ME: Why did you get me fewer pills?

WIFE: Women live longer than men. You don’t like it when I waste money on things we might not need.

 

How we’re spending our early, and extended, summer vacation

Hello, Blogosphere. It’s been a while. The last time we talked, the world was kind of almost normal. That seems like years ago.

I’ve been keeping busy over the past four months, or ten years, or however long it’s been since the good ol’ days. I am fortunate to have been fully employed. Keeping three boys academically engaged has been a challenge, one upon which my wife and I hope never to be judged.

Fortunately, our 7th grader has been more than willing to coach our 3rd grader and our 1st grader. Consequently, they are now all playing Fortnite at grade level.

Big Brother has been honing his basketball skills in the driveway. He can almost dunk on an 8.5-foot rim. The standard basketball rim is 10 feet high, so once he gains a foot and half of lift, he’ll be able to show the world how he can almost dunk.

I don’t know if the boy will ever get beyond almost dunking. I’m afraid he inherited my farmer’s legs. If you don’t know about farmer’s legs, try to imagine the last time you heard a sportscaster mention Old McDonald’s amazing elevation on his vertical leap. That’s all you need to know.

Buster and Big Man have been reading with me every day. Never have pride and pain worked hand in hand as they do on me when I listen to the boys read. Did you know a kid can read a word perfectly four times in a row and then be completely baffled by it the fifth time his eyes meet it? Did you know his slightly old brother can tackle a serious of four-syllable words with aplomb before being defeated by a single-syllable word with no phonic irregularities?

The reading is easy compared to the paperwork the school sent. It’s not particularly difficult work; it’s just hard to find motivation to do schoolwork when the TV is so close, especially when you’re sure there is at least one channel showing Sponge Bob, regardless of the time of day.

When you are distracted by the thought of missed cartoons, you make mistakes. When my children make mistakes on their papers, it is sorely aggravating to me. It’s not that they made a mistake, or even that they made it from carelessness; what drives me up the wall is the way in which little boys erase their pencil marks.

erasing

What number is this? Whatever number answers the problem.

I have three boys, and not one of them can erase a pencil mark worth a damn. They take two half-hearted swipes at the paper with the eraser and then write the new answer overtop the mangled result.  After the first attempt, I must assume they found the correct answer, because something in the tangled carnage of pencil scratches is bound to be right, at least approximately.

The big takeaway from the current situation is I should not be the one charged with educating my children. They don’t respect my credentials, and I’m not as engaging as Sponge Bob. That last part stings.

Stale socks and missing presidents

I’m not sure if my boys are getting too wise for me or just have too many wisecracks for me.

This morning I told Buster he had to change socks. “Remember last time, when your socks smelled so bad because of your stinky feet?” I asked. “I don’t want the stinky sock alarm to go off in school. Then everybody will have to evacuate the building because of you.”

He gave me that long, thoughtful, 2nd grade look. “Why does everybody say the alarm goes off, instead of the alarm goes on?”

I gave him that long, thoughtful, grad school dropout look. “I don’t know. It’s just what they say.” I pushed a pair of clean socks into his hand and ran away.

It’s Big Man’s sharing day. This is the modern way of saying he should take something for Show and Tell. In our Kindergarten, sharing is done by letter. The kids bring something to share that begins with the letter they are studying that week.

This week’s letter is L. We had hoped Big Man could take our Abraham Lincoln PEZ dispenser, but Lincoln recently went missing from our PEZ collection. As we sorted through our PEZ dispensers, I loudly asked the universe, “Where’s Mr. Lincoln?”

From the next room, came the universe’s terse reply, wrapped in Buster’s childish voice: “He’s dead.”

Big Man got an idea. “I think I might know where Mr. Lincoln is,” he told me, leading me toward the hall closet. “I think he’s in a blue or green bag. A teal bag.” At first, I didn’t understand his last description, so unready was I to hear a Kindergartner describe a color as teal. He rooted around in the closet and pulled out a bag that was plainly teal, to my limited understanding of blended hues.

Mr. Lincoln was not inside. The teal bag was a dead end.

We ran out of time before we located Mr. Lincoln, and if he’s hitching rides in colorful over-the-shoulder totes, we may never find him. In his place we sent PEZ Andrew Johnson. We rehearsed our story so Big Man could explain why he was bringing a J to L sharing. It boils down to this: “Mr. Johnson is here to announce the sad news that we’ve lost Mr. Lincoln.”

For all we know, he belongs to the ages now.

“I have very sad news about PEZ Lincoln.”