What can I say? Melisa came to town and I didn’t blog for a week. Mostly because I had to entertain her. She’s exceptionally needy – if “needy” = comes in with beer, gummy bears and clown noses, makes me laugh, pulls me away from my computer, encourages me to go for long walks in the sunshine, eat good food, and explore parts of my own town I never see.

Melisa first came to see me in 2009 and it’s been a long time coming, but I would like to thank whomever left that freezer door ajar.

There is something to be said for a friend who can come into your house and fit into the family so seamlessly that by the third day you accidentally call her, “Honey” and halfway mean it.

At least there will still be a piece of her here with us after she leaves.

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Although we live in the city, there isn’t a whole lot of diversity in my neighborhood. The Ohio State University isn’t far away and there is an array of color and culture there, but I don’t make a habit of letting my kids walk around Big Ten campuses. Maybe MAC, but not Big Ten.

So yesterday afternoon I carted the kids off to the International Festival. We ate Chinese food (but, only because I didn’t see the Mediterranean booth, no offense to the fried-rice), we watched Irish, Indian, African and Russian dancers and looked at art and crafts from around the world.

Then my daughter and I got henna tattoos.

I have always wanted a little, teeny-tiny tattoo and I’m pretty sure that henna is the gateway drug of body art. I love this design on the inside of my wrist.

Even if it does closely resemble my living room rug.

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My husband was working in the yard last weekend when he saw me through a window and asked me to come outside. I went out of the front door to find him waving me over to a flower bed. When I joined him, he pointed at the ground and said, “What is that?”

Photo courtesy of The Hiker's Notebook

We both crouched down to get a closer look at the patch of things growing from the mulch. Then we got a whiff of it.

The green, sticky substance on the end smelled like dog poop. My husband pulled one from the ground and tried to put it near my face, you know, for a closer smell. As I ran away, he chased me.

Herein lies the question: Did the house next door take so long to sell because our flower beds smell like poop, because my husband acts like a 12 year old or because it looks like we’re growing male body parts?

Any way you slice it, our new neighbors are going to love it here.

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You know how you have a day off, but your kids still have to go to school and you scream, “This is going to be GLORIOUS!”, and it immediately goes downhill when you shovel the driveway for the fifth time in a week, and drop off the kids at school (which is not the same as dropping them off at the pool) and they argue the whole time, then you go to the ob/gyn and get a pap smear, and after that you go to the grocery store for the first time since December 23rd and trudge through the snow with a very full cart, then go to the pharmacy and find out they don’t have your medicine in stock, and after you take your boatload of food home and put it away you go to your mom’s house to shovel her driveway, and you’re sweating, and coughing, and it’s heavy, and your coffee is cold, and then a man comes across the street with his snowblower and finishes the job for you, and that man is 90 years old, and he smiles at you, and having crossed his (snowblown) path makes your heart happy and the day ends up being glorious after all?

Yeah, me too.

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