Why the hell do we need to make modeling dough for children that smells like such things as fruit or baked goods? I was taught not to eat my play doughs, not because they would have killed me if eaten, but because it wasn’t what you did with them. Clay was not for eating. It was socially unacceptable to eat the dough. In what way does having said dough for children smell like raisin bread going to keep kids from wanting to eat clay? What … kids weren’t eating enough clay without the enticement of flavorful scents?!

Same goes for those scented markers too. Sniffing (most) markers isn’t going to hurt you, but that isn’t what markers are for. It is socially unacceptable to sniff markers. Yet, there are scented markers on the market just for kids. Of course they are going to sniff them, and since they aren’t harmful, the parents aren’t going to tell them not to sniff them. Then kids think it’s perfectly OK to sniff markers.

Well, it’s not OK to eat clays, and it’s not OK to sniff markers. Sure, those clays and those markers aren’t going to hurt them, but there are some that can. So why let them think it’s OK to sniff markers and eat clay? Children, even at a surprisingly high age, don’t tend to read the fine print or look for a non-toxic rating on things before sniffing them or putting them in their mouths. It’s just a marker or just some play dough until they get there hands on something that is toxic, poisonous, or causes respiratory or brain damage, and there are markers and clays out there that can do just that. I know, because I have worked with them. It would just be easier, I would think, to teach them early on, the way I and my peers were taught, simply not to eat clay or sniff markers. It’s really just a good rule of thumb, I would say.

So what are we teaching kids again?

It doesn’t matter which bay I pull into at Sonic, I end up in the only one with a broken card reader.

The plants I have in the three and five gallon pots aren’t doing well at all. I’m not sure what the problem is, but I just finished basically re-potting them with a mix of composted manure and the dirt they were in. When I go to the store this week, I guess I’ll try to find some organic fertilizer that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

I’m hoping the poor plants don’t react to the new dirt mixture the way my hands did. I now have bright red palms that feel really warm, and I am not sure why. I’ve never had any sort of strange reaction to any natural gardening product before, not even pure and natural cow poo, so this is a little weird.

All I can do now is hope they don’t die overnight and that maybe this will help them out a little in some way. They are developing good root structures, and they don’t have any bugs chewing on them, so I don’t have any idea what, other than a lack of nutrients, could be making the plants themselves not grow better.

Ugh. Now I have to go figure out what to make for dinner when I don’t feel like making anything at all. Hope we have some sandwich stuff, ’cause that’s about all I feel like making.

They say the cobbler’s children have no shoes. Engineer’s wives apparently don’t have well-built trellises for their snap beans either, not because the engineer is too busy designing and building trellises for other people, but because the engineer is too busy laughing at his wife’s feeble attempts to build something. It’s pretty common knowledge that I am an artist and not a builder, so I failed to be amused by his amusement.

An hour and a half of my life spent making a trellis, and the end result is, I must admit myself, hilariously feeble and must be the most ridiculous trellis on the planet. I think I even heard the snap beans laughing at me.

Go ahead. Laugh. Everyone else has … even me. It’s a pathetic excuse for a trellis, but it’s just going to have to do.

Nothing much is getting done around here today. Lin let me sleep all day. I don’t know why he did that, but if I asked, he’d just say I was so tight asleep I must have needed it. He’s right, of course. I normally don’t manage to stay asleep that long, even on a Sunday. Still, I had wanted to do a few things today, and now the day is almost over.

Since I found my thin, cheap wire yesterday, I guess I’ll hike out to the back of the yard and gather enough bamboo to make a trellis for my beans. If I don’t, they are going to start strangling my pepper plants. I’d wanted to put the trellis on after we moved everything, but it doesn’t look like anyone is motivated enough to move my garden, which actually suits me just fine. I didn’t want to move it anyway.

The other thing I wanted to do today was haul that green carpet out into the yard, take a photo of it, and offer it on Freecycle, but there’s rain in the forecast now, and once we haul it out, I do not want to haul it back in. I can’t leave it out in the rain either. I guess I could wrap it in plastic and set it on the porch, but I only have one plastic dropsheet at the moment, and it’s about to go get wrapped around my bicycle so it doesn’t get rained on.

Maybe once I get the trellis done I will feel motivated to sort out and photograph the other stuff going to Freecycle so I can post that on Monday. It’ll be so nice to be rid of this stuff that’s currently sitting around taking up room and being in the way. Once this first batch of stuff is gone, I am really going to see the improvement in the Box Room. I’m already seeing improvement, and if I can keep at it, I think two more weeks, and I will have a nice cleared room to start moving into. Orb’s Cave is almost a reality! Wheeee!

My mother has been calling almost every day, and the only real purpose of her calls is to guilt me into coming for Mother’ Day. Yesterday she flat out asked why I don’t want to come. I flat out told her a) it costs about $50 just to get there and back, even without any extraneous spending, b) it’s Lin’s busy season, and we never know when he’s suddenly going to need to work, and c) I don’t want to make the trip by myself so soon already, because the driving wears me out completely and leaves me achy for a couple of days. In a more perfect world where gas was cheap, traffic on holidays wasn’t insane, and Lin drove me anywhere I wanted to go, I’d be there for Mother’s Day. Maybe.

I say “maybe” for one good reason: I was just there for two whole, long, and busy days a mere three weeks ago. The way she is carrying on about me “not wanting to come see” her, you’d think I hadn’t been there for months and months.

She’s pulling out all the stops on the guilt trips too, and it’s really, really beginning to grate. I wonder if her mom did this to her too. The distance from my parents’ house to my grandparents’ house is the same as the one I make to go see her, and while gas used to be a lot cheaper, we were all a lot more poor and had crappy cars prone to breaking down. I don’t recall us going to see my grandparents more than a couple times a year (until their health failed and Dad started leaving Mom there for weeks at a time), and Mom most certainly never went by herself owing to the fact she didn’t get her driver’s license until 9 years ago. So did her mother nag her into insanity about coming to visit, even when it was an expensive and troublesome thing to do, and now she’s passing that insanity and all the guilt trips on to me? I have no idea, but I think I will ask her straight out about it.

This new Orb, the one who is tossing out all the rubble of her past, is even more intolerant of guilt trips and manipulation than the old Orb was (and she wasn’t all that tolerant of it either). New Orb expects the adults in her life to act like adults and to treat her like an adult. When I am asked to do something, and I say no, while supplying perfectly valid reasons, I expect that decision to be respected. When I ask her to come over for a visit, which I do from time to time, and she says no, because she doesn’t want to make the long drive alone and she can’t really afford it right now, I don’t call her every day whining, begging, and cajole her to come visit and lay on guilt trips about how she doesn’t want to come see me. I take her answer as an answer and leave it at that. All I want is to be treated the same way. I don’t think I am asking too much.

I’m going to go fume over another cup of coffee. Lin says I shouldn’t let her get to me the way she does, and that the only way someone gets the power to bother me that much is when I give that power to them, and he is absolutely right, but he doesn’t have anyone like this in his life, so he can’t possibly know what it is like living with a button-pusher. It’s really quite awful, especially when you really do care about the person and want them to be happy.

And so ends today’s Mom Rant.

It’s OK to forget people you once knew.

Anything more I might say now would only serve to diminish that simple and true statement.