Lazy Germophobe

When people see our dog Opie (left), they notice his two different colored eyes first. Then they say, “What IS he?”—a mystery we have been trying to unravel since we “rescued” him from a kill shelter in South Carolina in January 2015. In the only photo we had seen, he appeared to be a German shepherd mix, which is exactly what we wanted. He looked young; the rescue organization thought three or four months old. Also exactly what we wanted! Perfect! We started the process to get him brought up to Vermont from South Carolina, which was surprisingly rigorous, with references and home visits. Finally a group of dogs was set to be transported up from SC. All of us adopters received a message telling us to show up at 4:30 the next afternoon at the Kmart that was about to go out of business. Standing around that empty parking lot waiting for a van to arrive from another state with our dogs felt super sketchy. We stood around making black market jokes.  I had been tasked with gett...

Mice are a scourge. They are awful. They carry diseases. They eat our stuff and then poop on our other stuff. Mice do not belong in my house, and as a matter of fact, there are too many of them outside, too. I’m no biologist, but common sense suggests we are overrun with mice because there aren’t enough natural predators. I live in an area with hawks, owls, snakes, and foxes, we STILL have too many mice. That’s why we need to suck it up, gird our loins, and just kill them. If I had my way, live traps for mice would not exist. The reason the mouse’s natural predators are in decline is our fault. If humans are going to displace the wild animals that keep our rodent populations in check, then it’s our duty to step in and do their job for them. We have to kill the mice. “Oh, but they’re so cuuuuute!” Stop it. Mice are germy and carry serious illnesses like hantavirus . (Yes, hantavirus is rare, but it can be deadly.) Mice will not hesitate to poop on your...

On an early episode of the TV show The West Wing, Josh steps in to do a press conference after White House Press Secretary C.J. Cregg has emergency root canal and can’t speak properly (in one of Allison Janney’s more hilarious performances). Josh starts by asking a reporter if he really wants his one permitted question to be “that stupid,” and it goes downhill from there. If you’ve got three minutes, it’s worth a look . I keep trying to start this blog and asking myself, do I really want my first post to be that stupid? I’m struggling to choose a topic. I’d like it to be neither boring nor controversial. I asked my eleven-year-old, and he thinks that as a stay-at-home/work-at-home mom, I should start with parenting; parenting wasn’t even on my list of twenty-six possible article topics! I mean, does parenting really need its own category? It’s as inextricably linked with my identity as it is entwined with several of my brainstormed blog ideas—rural life, getting older, cook...