April Showers...

... bring really biiiig puddles. Late last summer, our neighbors put in a wooden privacy fence. All well and good, especially as he likes to go out into the generously-sized yard and hit a few golf balls. Although he has a net for them, a few would go astray. Not so with the fence.

Unfortunately, the presence of said fence has had one notable drawback... its at the bottom of the slight decline of our yard, which means no drainage. If it rains, we have a small lake under the trees. The robins are enjoying this greatly, as they're out there splashing around in it. The squirrel? Well, he's not so pleased, since his favorite napping place is the small sapling that's right in the middle of of the water and to get to it now he either has to eat his squirrel wheaties and make one hella leap off the top of the fence, or climb one of the larger trees and try and drop down, flying squirrel-like. I have seen him miss just once and that was one pissed-off rodent. Apparently he doesn't have a problem digging up nuts and grubs and such in the rain, but he draws the line at getting a bath.


And have we discussed the woman suing Victoria's Secret over a bra injury yet? Seriously. She's suing for a "bra malfunction" that resulted in a slice to her boob. She claims that said boob injury will negatively impact her desire for a modeling career, which makes me scoff ever so slightly. What, breast augmentation leaves no scars? Come on now. Unless you plan on topless modeling, I suspect your hooter scratch isn't going to be an issue. And probably every woman who's ever owned an even slightly off-the-wall cat (which does seem to be a prerequisite for BEING a cat) is likely to have some mark left from a time when the cat decided to climb straight up and over the front of her. Can I get a show of hands? Uh-huh, there you go.

VS, naturally, insists that the woman's misuse of their product is probably responsible for her injury. Now think about that. How in heck does one MISUSE A BRA? I mean, I can give you a few suggestions, being somewhat left of center in the whole brain department, but that's beside the point. Now, I myself narrowly escaped a bra injury when I worked in DC but someone else was wearing it. She and I had decided to get some lunch and as we were walking up 19th street, her underwire failed spectacularly. (She was quite generously endowed) This underwire actually shot straight out the side of her sweater, rocketing past me to clatter against the side of the building. Naturally, we laughed ourselves sick but we never once considered that we could SUE for something like this. I mean really!

Sometimes the General Public astounds me.

Also, while I'm thinking about boobs and bras and such, I have a funny-NOW-but-no-so-much-THEN tale to share because clearly I don't get enough people laughing at me in the couse of a normal day.

When I was pregnant with Short Stuff, I didn't have a very easy time of it and was confined to bed rest more than once. I also swelled right on up to uncomfortable proportions, including the chest. My cups? They runneth over and flooded the place. I went from a 34b to "oh mah gawd its GODZILLA" (you know, if Godzilla were a chick and had boobs. And I refer to classic 'zilla and not that STUPID movie in the 90s) Anyway. After I'd hit the 40E mark and left it behind, there were days when bras seemed more torture than support. And so it was that once day after my shower, I was still feeling overheated and desperate and I decided that I was just going to lay there in my undies. It's not like my husband was gonna care, right?

I heard slow, measured footsteps on the stairs and knew my husband was coming up to check on me. Yeah. I couldn't have been more wrong. The door burst open and my poor teenaged son's eyes bugged out of his head and he threw himself backwards, nearly falling down the stairs in the effort to escape the horror he'd just witnessed. That had to be the ONLY time in his entire life he'd actually walked up the stairs like a normal person, so it didn't even occur to me that what I heard was anyone other than my husband.

It seems that he'd come by the house for a visit and I hadn't heard him come in. My husband said "Oh, go on up and see your mom!"

He certainly did. To his chagrin, he REALLY saw his mom.