Our remarkably long spring has drawn to a close, bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes at the sides of the highway long since replaced by disappearing swaths of Indian blanket, and now five-foot-tall sunflowers have seemingly sprung up overnight to border all of the fields.

But I still haven’t acclimatized to the relentlessness of the heat and the Texas sun.  There are no tall, shade-producing trees out here in New Exurbia, and even if I hustle Theo out the door immediately after breakfast we’re both visibly exhausted and droopy by 9 or 9:30 a.m. from the effort of moving through the swampy warmth.  It’s strange, because we never leave the house without

• four different types of applied sunscreen
• two pairs of sunglasses
• a small assortment of small hats
• rash guards, swimsuits, a swim diaper or diaper cover (for pool / splash pad)
• fresh-from-the-refrigerator drinking water

… and yet, despite all of the protective gear, going outside isn’t super fun.  Even outdoor swimming pools are the temperature of a warm bath, which is less than refreshing on a mercilessly hot afternoon.

The biggest (though admittedly minor) insult to my wilting-flower self is that the tube of deodorant that I just opened up has been working overtime, like seriously overtime, to deal with the weather.  I complained to Pete about how I felt like my armpits were aggressively sending scent-blasts of vaguely floral baby powder in all directions, which sounded even to my own ears like hyperbolic oversensitivity.  Then — sitting six feet away from me, indoors, when I wasn’t sweating and hadn’t been for a good while — he picked up the smell.  ”Sort of… sweet?  Floral, powder, kind of?  Yup, I can smell that.”  I wear deodorant so that people can’t smell my armpits from a long way away, even if they are redolent of Love’s Baby Soft, so the offending canister has been jammed into the recesses of my bathroom cabinet so it can take some time out and think about what it’s done.

That doesn’t solve my ‘urgh, heat” problem, but I’m working on keeping our fridge stocked with iced tea, and my (very) long-term goals include teaching Theo to pour out some tea into a glass with ice and to bring it out to me as I sit under the fan on the front porch.  Or on the couch in our air-conditioned living room.  Either way.

So as to not bury the lede: crazy things have been happening in the Jejune household.  I tried a folksy, unscientific, and poorly-documented internet home remedy for a minor medical problem, and it worked.  I mean, I’m writing as someone who still feels like a dirty hippie whenever I use a neti pot or eat kale.  I have no interest in “juicing.”  I have strong feelings about the importance of vaccinations.  So, WTF, apple cider vinegar?  How the hell did you get rid of my warts?

Between me and Pete, the following wart-removal methods have been attempted:

• Doctor-administered chemical blistering
• Doctor (as opposed to amateur at-work in-lab) liquid nitrogen
• Salicylic acid
• Duct tape
• Brute force
• Crazy pregnancy hormones
• Swabbing with bits of raw potato, banana peel, etc.
• (Sadly, I know no seventh sons of a seventh sons, rainwater-filled tree stumps, or wart whisperers.)

And if there’s one thing that’s become painfully clear, it’s that everybody’s warts are different.  There is no known removal method that works on all warts, all the time.  (This is where some well-meaning member of the commentariat will pipe up to trot out the well-worn internet chestnut about how science has proven the efficacy of duct tape.  To which I can only respond that I saw my very scientific husband meticulously apply duct tape to a plantar wart every day for three months with absolutely no change in its wartiness, and that subsequent studies have suggested that it’s not a magic bullet.  I have no doubt that it works for many people, but those people don’t seem to be us.)

Pete, who gets the occasional but persistent plantar wart on the soles of his feet, has had particular luck with the first three things on the list above.  For my part, the odd rash of small warts that appeared on parts of my hands that had been suffering severe eczema (and consequentially slathered with prescription-strength cortisone) had recently reached critical mass.  At-home applications of prescription-strength salicylic acid hadn’t been getting me anywhere.  The doctor would be my next choice, except that Pete was busy with finals-week stuff during all of my GP’s office hours and the idea of trying to pin down a squirmy toddler who would really like to explore that drawer of scalpels with my left hand while having flesh frozen off the right seemed less than desirable.  So, I decided to try the internet’s random suggestion of apple cider vinegar in the meantime.  And, to my astonishment, it worked.

I’m not going to post a complete resume of my method here, because years online have taught me that a) there are a whole lot of people who use the internet despite evidently not being able to read, and b) I am not a doctor.  But I followed the basic recommendation of applying a piece of vinegar-soaked cotton  to the warts in question, covering / securing it with a band-aid or athletic tape or whatever (definitely the hardest part, when you’re dealing with your hands), and then carefully scraping off the bits of blackened dead wart that resulted.  Some of the smallest warts disappeared quickly and without incident, or with a small blister.  The largest left a remarkably smooth and tidy little crater that eventually scabbed over.  The biggest problem I had was  band-aid adhesive setting off my hand eczema again, which… yeah, should’ve seen that coming.

In conclusion: I’ll hand you this one, hippies.  But I still feel like we’re all eating disproportionate quantities of kale.

One of Theo’s little peers has gained the word “mama” (and only “mama”), and man, it is intense: “Mama mama mam mam mama mama!!!  Mammaaaaa!!!!!!!”.  I mean, Theo’s been crying, whining, moaning, grabbing, pinching, and biting at me for most of the past 16 months now to make his wishes known, but at least the babbling, grunting, and pointing allow me to exercise some deliberately selective understanding when it suits me.

But he just picked up his first few words — I almost said that he put them “in rotation,” but that’s misleading because there is actually very little rotation to speak of — and it’s surprising just how much that tiny sliver of language has illuminated some heretofore obscure recesses of his infantile brain.

During the past two days, I have learned:

• What Theo thinks about immediately after he’s woken up in the morning: “Ball!  Bawl?  Baw?  Ball!”
• What Theo thinks about when we arrive on page four of Dr. Seuss’s ABC (“Barber, baby, bubbles, and a bumblebee”): “Bah?  Bawl?  Baw?”
• What Theo thinks about after he’s woken up from his nap: “Ball!  Bawl? Ball!”
• What Theo thinks about when he looks out the living room windows: “Ball!  Baw?”
• What Theo thinks about when he sees a photo of a ceiling fan: “Bah?  Ball!”
• What Theo thinks when he sees an illustration of car, bus, or bicycle wheels: “BAWL!  Baw!”
• What Theo thinks about when he lies in his crib, looking up at his mobile: “Ball!”
• What Theo thinks when he sees a glob of fluff left over from an old birds’ nest: “Ball?”

You guys, I never would have guessed.

You don’t need to spend much time around kids’ clothes, toys, and books before you realize the excessive preeminence of animals.  Nothing against animals, mind you, but at times it seems like the industrial children’s educational toy complex is hell-bent upon inculcating knowledge about a bizarrely extensive menagerie of animals (both barnyard variety and exotically orientalized) before all else.  I mean, Theo is reasonably interested in cats and birds, both of which are fairly well-represented in our little library, but his equally keen interest in ceiling fans, light fixtures, and walls goes all but unrecognized in the picture books I’ve searched.  Why, then, is he being schooled about “wood louse” and “stoat,” I ask?

If there were any justice in the world — and, I suppose, if they made cuter motifs for a onesie or jumparoo — city workers would assume the preeminence of animals in the children’s pantheon, because they are the rock stars of the junior set.

The guys who drive the groundskeeping carts at the park?  Fascinating!

The landscapers raking mulch around some bushes?  Giants among men!

The guys from the city who periodically mow the greenspace across the street with those big, fast-moving, super-maneuverable commercial lawnmowers?  Hypnotic!

The crew of our local trash truck?  The Beatles, playing Shea Stadium!

What’s more, all of the above people are more than willing to smile and wave to the overawed, slack-jawed toddlers in their midst.  The trash guys are the best: “Hey, little buddy!” one of them will always shout while waving enthusiastically, and the driver will make sure to honk the horn for us as he pulls away and again as he comes back around down the street.

They are genuinely gracious to their pint-sized fans, but where is Baby’s First Book of City Workers?  I suppose it’s time to start studying the works of Richard Scarry, replete as they are with blue-collar feline greengrocers and inept vulpine fix-it men.  At least Theo will be prepared for whenever we visit Wisconsin next, and he sees his first real hot-dog car in the wild.

I stand by the statement I made a couple of months ago that the growing independence of our young toddler is awesome, though I also think that, with our particular model of child, the “walking” feature has been significantly overhyped.  Every time your kid achieves a new gross motor milestone — rolling over, crawling, pulling to a stand, cruising — you hear a friendly chorus of “oooh, you’re in trouble now!” from onlookers.  Whenever Theo finally started to walk, I was told, he’d be off like a shot, and I’d get to spend my days chasing him down and away from certain danger in parks, malls, parking lots, and stores.

While that’s partially true — the kid has a dedicated mission to pull all the books off the library shelves as quickly as possible, and woe be to me if I decide not to take the stroller out of the trunk and end up staggering back to the car, burning arms laden down with toddler, diaper bag, and a precariously slippery 15-pound stack of picture books — much of the time these days when I put Theo down he collapses to the floor in a wailing puddle, apparently unable to use his legs. (He “went boneless,” in Knuffle Bunny terms.)

There are many possible causes of this angst: the fact that the inside of our house is deadly boring, as long as there is an Outside to whine at the door for; the point of an errant molar that popped up through the gum a couple of days ago; the fact that he is filled with progressively greater and greater feelings with only a single idiosyncratic word — an emphatic, carefully articulated “bah BAP!”, meaning “all done!” — with which to communicate them all.  But on any given day, I’ve probably done a good amount of eye-rolling by the time that the clock hits 8:30 a.m., while Theo vociferously protests the injustices of Inside and I check the traffic before embarking on the morning’s out-of-the-house adventure(s).

It’s not a bad life, and I don’t doubt that all of the time spent outdoors, around other adults and children, in the library, and just generally puttering around is generally more wholesome for both of us than one spent exclusively in the confines of the couch.  But, man, the couch would be nice sometimes.

The comparison that I’ve come up with is that, right now, spending the day with Theo is kind of like spending 8-10 hours without being able to sit down.  Not that I’m running around at anything faster than a moderate walk, but unless we’re in the car there’s really no sitting, reading, working, crafting, or looking at a computer until the blessed mid-afternoon break of naptime, when I plop myself down at my desk and crack open a celebratory Diet Pepsi.

Yup, we’re doing the toddler endurance shuffle.  With lots of pauses to poke at pillbugs and collect particularly impressive pieces of mulch along the way.

Young Theo, Mulch-King, pauses to survey his mighty domain.

(The perfect sure is the enemy of the good when it comes to writing blog posts, isn’t it?  I’d had a draft of this post sitting around for a couple of weeks, until I finally acknowledged that it’s honestly not a topic that merits much more time or thought.)

Pete and I have been amusing ourselves by thinking about installing a vintage 1980s-era Dixie Cup dispenser in our bathroom, because it seems like the sort of item that could be repopularized by hipster nostalgia.  I had friends with Dixie Cup dispensers when I was a kid, and they always seemed so cool.  Today, though, the idea of consuming water in waste-heavy three-ounce increments seems very… of its time.  I refill my 32-ounce water bottle about three times a day; that’s only 32 sanitary, germ-free disposable paper cups floating around in my trash can!

Of course, I felt all smug, until I watched this ad, since I have decried slimy and unwashed bathroom cups many, many times in the past. And I used to wear those one-piece scratchy fleece footie pajamas, too. “Mrs. Smith,” Dixie-Cup drinker, c’est moi!

Last Thursday night, Pete was up writing an exam for his students.  He came into the bedroom, where I was doing that thing you do when you’re tried and trying not to drop the book that you’re reading onto your face:  ”M.I.T. just sent out an email saying that there’s an active shooter on campus in Building 32.”

“What… the hell?” was about all that I could formulate.

I’m hardly qualified to call myself a Bostonian, honorary or otherwise.  Like many academics, we were passing through.  Pete loved his job, but we weren’t there long enough to make any other friends.  And I was pregnant during the last bit of our time in Massachusetts — a pregnancy enabled and funded by the generous insurance laws of the Commonwealth, mind you!–  during what was turning out to be an unusually hot summer, so I never got out to see nearly as much of the city as I’d planned to before we moved.  As tends to happen in such cases, we really only got to meet our next door neighbors in the House of Aging Hippies when we were having all kinds of problems with the Department of Public Works a) informing us, at the last minute, that we couldn’t park our (large) moving truck on our (quiet) street, like, at all, and b) then proceeding to jackhammer up the sidewalks and driveways without notification in our neighborhood a mere three days before the move, which was where — with the generous assistance of the HoAH — we’d planned on depositing the moving trailer, in our houses’ three adjoining off-street spaces.

Well, Watertown.  WELL.  It was shocking to wake up on Friday and see pictures online of police blockades set up in front of the Lebanese markets across the street from our old bus stop, having my mom tell me that she recognized the diner where we’d eat when they came up to visit, and to boggle at the photos of SWAT teams and police helicopters massed at the entrance to the mall across the street from the Target a mile from our house that I’d walk to a couple of times a week.  And to imagine what life would be like if, on a fine April day, we were huddled up inside our old first-floor flat with a cranky toddler, waiting for the police to conduct door-to-door searches through our little neighborhood while a murderous terrorist in an explosive vest prowled around somewhere outside.  (And then to realize that the very Boat of Notoriety was located in a backyard two houses away from an apartment we’d looked at renting.)

Dear Department of Public Works: all is forgiven.  Watertown, I miss you way more than I thought, and I’m so, so, so very glad that everything’s OK, and hope to not see you on the news again any time soon.  And Boston — on behalf of the many who have called you their temporary home, we’re all thinking about you, and trying to make just that many more gratuitous uses of the adjective “wicked.”

… I don’t hate Pinterest, okay?  But I finally just put my finger on the reason why it makes me cringe: it gives you a lot of shallow, pretty pieces of information at once, when I tend to look for fewer things involving more… words.

For example: I know people who use Pinterest to find and organize recipes.  Great!  But, instead of making totally-random-person’s uncommented-on and untried recipe, I’d rather look for something with some more corroborating information, you know?  Or: I’ve made mujadara for lunch this week, which even Theo thinks is pretty awesome, despite not being the type of thing that appears below the chicken fingers and grilled cheese on the kids’ menu at restaurants.  But it’s a joyless-looking mash of rice, lentils, and caramelized onions, and despite being delicious, it’s not the kind of thing that tends to stand out with a splashy photo and garner hundreds of re-pins and “Looks yummmmyyyy!” comments.  I’m pretty sure if I hadn’t read somebody raving about the recipe, I never would’ve tried it.

Pinterest is also the land of self-replicating half-assed tutorials of the “three easy steps to this elaborate salon updo which we’ll describe as ‘easy’ and ‘messy’!” kind, and tragically incomplete instructions for craft projects.  (To say nothing of its more aspirational qualities: as I’ve said many times elsewhere, I’m really glad that I got married before the era of Pinterest, because I didn’t then realize that every single aspect of your wedding needs to be infused with homemade, quirky personal touches that apparently validate your marriage.  What does our lack of a cake topper say about our relationship?!)

But! I successfully used Pinterest to find a DIY solution to a problem, and it worked!  Which was apparently noteworthy enough for me to compose an entire post about it!

***

I just got a new computer to replace my old one, which was chugging along just fine, except for the fact that it would come to a gasping, shuddering standstill whenever I had to open up Photoshop, despite my having maxed out all available RAM slots and adding Pete’s old hard drive for additional storage space.  When I was looking around online for a new computer — technical specifications: must be able to run Photoshop and play music and maybe even have a web browser open, at the same time — Pete pointed out that I could buy a laptop with the same specs as the desktops that I was looking at, for about the same amount of money.

Which I vigorously protested for about two days.  I’m not a laptop person!  I like having a full-sized keyboard and mouse!  And big screen!  And speakers!  … Even though the keyboard on the laptops that I was looking at were sufficiently large, wireless mice exist and are readily available for purchase, a 15″ laptop screen wasn’t that much of an optical downgrade from my 19″ desktop monitor (which could always be plugged in for use during editing sessions, of course), and speakers, too, can be plugged in to a laptop at rest.  And — as someone who has to reluctantly shove in much of her work at the end of a long day of child-wrangling — a laptop can be transported to the couch.

So, of course, I bought a new laptop, and promptly honored its portability by plugging more cables into it than Neo before he got flushed out of the Matrix.

Enter Pinterest, and best cord management solution that presented itself for 9 p.m. on a Sunday night, represented only in this unattributed image (actually from How About Orange):

So we broke out my gallon bag of sundry binder clips. Even though most of these are from various workplace supply rooms, and I routinely maintain a safe perimeter around the Cute Office Supply aisle at Target, many different clip sizes are represented therein:

(An extra-special thanks goes out to Sebastian, who begrudgingly agreed to get off my chair so I could stand on it to get these photos during naptime, but only because I kept moving my feet all around him, jeez. Can’t a cat nap at his desk in peace?)

But instead of snagging neatly in the round end of the wire piece, my iPod cable immediately and repeatedly slithered out of the jumbo-sized clip.

It then stubbornly refused to fit into a medium-sized clip at all.

Enter Pete, who revealed what the photo at Pinterest could not: that you can squeeze the two sides of the metal piece together to remove it, thereby enabling cord-threading.

Self-portraits of sausage fingers ahoy!

Boom.  Cord tamed.

Before:

Take the red pill, Neo.  Find out how deep the rabbit hole goes:

Thanks, Pinterest, for materially improving my life! Or at least ensuring that I don’t spend as much time scrabbling around underneath my desk for runaway cables!