Pumpkins!

This will be our fourth Halloween overseas. Sadly, the first three were jack-o-lantern free. You just don't find pumpkins in the Philippines.

But lo and behold, what did we find at the store today? Actual pumpkins imported from the US! They were puny and a little deformed and there weren't very many, but...PUMPKINS! I did a happy dance right there in the store.

It's been a good day. I got up early (for me) to pick up a document for the adoption, and things have been going swimmingly ever since. The line at city hall was short, and no one tried to charge me more than the actual fee, and a couple of guys behind the counter actually FLIRTED with me. I nearly dropped dead of shock right then and there. Dear husband gets flirted with on a regular basis, because that's just the way things work here. For me it took 3 1/2 years.

So between the pumpkins and the flirting and the short lines, life just doesn't get much better.

Oh, and an update on our rat problem:

Rat 4, People 0

We're dealing with one cunning rat. I wanted to avoid poison if at all possible, so we tried a cage-type trap. Result: food gone, no rat. Twice.

Plan B: We picked up a few of the traditional mouse traps (industrial sized) and baited them with cheese and Chips Ahoy. Twice more: food gone, no rat. Grrrrrr.

Tonight we break out the poisoned rat treats. Sorry, Mr. Fluffybuns. It's us or you.

A Matter of Perspective

If all goes well, our adoption petition will go to the courts this week. It's been a long road, with its share of setbacks and heartache. But the joy of having our daughter with us throughout the process has made it worth every moment. We've learned a lot. We're stronger and hopefully wiser than when we started. We've nearly cleared that final hurdle, though a court date could still be several months away.

And now we wonder what the future holds. Will love and honesty be enough? What questions will she ask when she's older? What issues will she face as an adopted child? How will we handle those who are curious, or prejudiced, or misinformed?

Already we've had plenty of practice with the well-meaning but misguided, "Isn't she a lucky girl?"

That's an easy one. We let them know that we're the lucky ones. And we'll let our daughter know it too, every single day.

Sad but True

I'm reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird this week. Here's a quote from the introduction:

"My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested."

This book is laugh-out-loud funny. The conversations in her head sound a lot like the ones in my head. It's good to know there are other mentally unstable writers out there who still manage to live productive lives.

Ant Warfare

I've blogged about bugs before. It's a topic worth revisiting. Because they just keep coming back.

Forget A Bug's Life. Forget the gentle, heroic ant in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. (How old am I?) Pay no attention to that catchy little song The Ants Go Marching.

Ants are evil.

They launched a full assault on the house today.

It's the rainy season, and for some odd reason the ants all want to come inside. They're not even after the food. If they find food, they eat it, but mostly they were just wandering around today making my life miserable. There were hundreds of them swarming around the front door, and from there they split off into a dozen strategic directions. They ambled across the marble floor in the living room, where our baby daughter spends a great deal of time crawling around. They surged through a crack in the kitchen window and set about exploring the sinks, countertops, walls, and cupboards. They had even built a network of roads where the walls meet the ceiling, with steady traffic traversing THE ENTIRE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE--wait, can a rectangular room have a circumference? Sorry--THE ENTIRE PERIMETER OF THE KITCHEN.

I had no choice but to bring out the big guns: Baygon (the Philippines equivalent of Raid) and Lysol.

The battle is over, but the war will continue.

I also have a bone to pick with those loveable rodents of Ratatouille. Just after battling the ants I walked outside to see an enormously obese rat waddle past.

Let's just hope he doesn't have a friend named Remy.

What's In Your Backpack?

My boys cart their favorite toys all over the house. Sometimes they use backpacks, other times baskets or cardboard boxes. They carry toy cars, stuffed animals, plastic spy gear, action figures, and bits of found objects like coins and golf tees and broken crayons. These are their most cherished possessions, things they take in the bathtub and while riding in the car. They fall asleep at night surrounded by their stuff.

It makes me wonder what I would put in my backpack or basket or cardboard box. If I had to choose the things I couldn't live without, things I would want if stranded on a desert island or in the middle of a traffic jam, what would they be?

• Laptop (so long as the island/traffic jam has WiFi and electricity)
• Family pictures (on the laptop)
• Notebooks and pencils
• Books
• iPod (same electricity provision applies)
• Claritin and Kleenex (says the eternal allergy sufferer)
• Midnight Milky Way bars
• Bloom lip gloss
• A camera
• Pepsi with ice
• 24-hour access to take-out from Prince of Jaipur (our favorite Indian restaurant)
• A horse
• A piano

All right, some of those are disqualified, darn it. I guess you just can't fit everything in a backpack.

That Daniel Powter Song

[cue the song about the bad day]

You drop your spoon on the floor at breakfast and then you step in a puddle in your socks and pretty soon it feels like the world is mocking you, its cruel laughter following you from room to room. You snap at your kids for no reason; your unmet goals become laughable pipe dreams. You fail to do anything productive before lunchtime and suddenly you've forever marred any chance of a happy life. Your entire future crumbles down around your ears, all because you dropped your spoon (or stubbed your toe, or ran out of Cheerios, or broke your favorite bottle of nail polish).

That was me today. (I made some of it up, but you get the idea.) I'm still in desperate need of some happy quotes. So here we go:

[cue Don't Stop Believin' by Journey]

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." -Eleanor Roosevelt

[cue any Yanni song]

"You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the magic tissue of the universe of your life. No one can take it from you. No one receives either more or less than you receive. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt. You can only waste the passing movements. You cannot waste tomorrow. It is kept for you." -Arnold Bennett

Looking forward to some new, unused magic tissue when I get up in the morning.

Essays and Old Friends

While E.B. White is probably best known for Charlotte's Web and The Elements of Style, I have fallen in love with his essays and find myself returning to them again and again. It's like visiting an old friend.

In the Foreword of Essays of E.B. White he writes:

"The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." [Much like a blogger.] "...Each new excursion of the essayist, each new 'attempt,' differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays."

White's quiet humor and keen observations frequently amaze me. He wrote for The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine, published a stack of books, and won an impressive list of awards, including the National Medal for Literature.

His citation for the Gold Medal for Essays and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters says this: "...When he writes of large subjects he does not make them larger and windier than they are, and when he writes of small things they are never insignificant."

When I grow up, I want to be E.B. White.