They Can Turn Me Off, But They Can't Shut Me Up!

You know it’s definitely a Monday when you wake up two hours early only to fall back to sleep just before the alarm actually goes off, causing you to hit the snooze button more times than you technically should and the only thing that keeps you from blithely sleeping away the morning is not the sense of duty to get up and go to work but the nagging knowledge that there is a child who needs to go to school (not WANTS, just NEEDS – there is a difference).

You know it’s definitely a Monday when you arrive to work after having a been off the previous Thursday and Friday and your residents decide to not recognize the fact that you were not here and expect you to be completely omniscient to their situations (and immediately have the solutions) the exact minute that you rush through the front door of the office six minutes late because of the previous waking up early/hitting the snooze button situation.

(It should be noted here that while YOUR arrival to work was late – the child was early getting to school. Go figure.)

You know it’s definitely a Monday when your computer advises you that it is unable to display your connected webpage – the webpage that includes all the work that you need access to for the current day, as well as to get caught up from the vacation days that you are now wondering why you felt the need to take them.

You know it’s definitely a Monday when you are forced to speak to a machine when calling your internet provider – a machine which does not seem to catch the snarkastic way you reply to it’s automatic questions, nor catches the snide comments made under your breath and which reaffirms to your soul that while these businesses may claim to be customer friendly but they are in fact not, for if they were customer friendly they would spend the minimum wage necessary to allow you to speak to an actual person who actually may know something.

Then again.

You know it’s definitely a Monday when you are finally allowed to speak directly to an actual person at the number you dial for your internet provider and you find that the person to whom you are speaking is in a different country altogether and you try desperately to remain polite, because you really need assistance getting back online, as you turn up your volume and listen as intently as possible and still have to have everything repeated at least three times in order to understand through the accent what is being said, all the while trying to figure out whether the other person is just a genius at understanding your accent or are they just getting lucky at their attempts in interpreting what you are trying to get assistance with or are they simply helping you with a problem which is not actually your problem.

(At this point, the vote could go in any direction, however the odds were heavy in favor of selection number three.)

You definitely know it’s a Monday when the physical person on the other end of your phone call to your internet service provider finally advises you that your number is a part of a “group outage” that began at approximately 9:47am causing you to snort with the insane laughter of one who is beginning to feel the slide over into the land of Insane Monday because you have been attempting to get onto the internet since 8:30am and it is now 10:12am and you were on hold and talking to animated voice machines from other countries for the last 36 minutes of your morning before you even had the opportunity to attempt to decipher the accent from the other end of the planet.

You definitely know it’s a Monday when the physical person on the other end of your phone call to your internet service provider advises you that the “group outage” is expected to be corrected by 2pm and, if it is not connected back up at the time that your day is two-thirds over and you've yet to accomplish anything remotely resembling catching up from last week's vacation days, to please give them a call back and allow them the opportunity to help you further which finally snaps the small modicum of control that you still had in your grasp as you snidely question aloud to the individual around the earth in another country who may or may not be understanding a bit of what you are trying to say the fact that that means that you will not be able to complete any work on your internet based programming, thus causing a standstill in your work production for another four hours and the physical person’s response becomes suspiciously similar to that of the animated voice machine you originally spoke with at the beginning of your phone call when they reply “that is correct however please call us back if your service is not connected after 2pm and thank you so much for calling AT&T and we look forward to continuing to help you in the future.”

Yeah. Right.

You definitely know it’s a Monday when you decide that they may take away your internet for a time but that doesn’t stop the words from coming. You just have to be more creative in getting them down and saving them until they can be posted.

And with the posting of the words, the frustration can be released.

And with the release of the frustration, harmony can be restored.

And with harmony restored, the rest of Monday can be faced.

And you know it’s definitely a Monday when you decide to relax and “go with the flow”, attempting to get other work done that is not internet based but your first post insane conversation with internet provider phone call is from an individual wishing to come visit your building, to see about an apartment for their elderly parent, that is hopelessly lost and needing assistance and they don’t seem to understand the straightforward, simple directions that you have given out for the last 9-1/2 years to everyone else that has been able to follow them without trouble and you finally try to assist by looking up where they think they are located in relation to where you are at that exact moment in order to perhaps give even more specific directions, only to find that they are sitting in the parking lot on the west side of the same church you share a parking lot with on the east side.

You know it’s definitely a Monday when all you can do is lay your head on your desk and laugh.

And laugh.

And laugh.

Oh ... btw ... the internet came back online at 1:22pm, signifying that I should continue to laugh and accept the small blessings. I'm going to need them.

Questions, Answers, and Bugs Dying Feet

My house is a place were bugs come to die.

It's true.

What's more, it doesn't bother me in the least.

As much as I love my little house, I recognize it's faults. There are many. Yet, it is a rental house and there is only so much that I can do, and so much that I can seem to get my landlord to do. One such fault that I simply can't fix by myself and, evidently, is not deemed to be of great importance to the man who owns the house is the fact that there are multitudes of little cracks and crevices that allow the little many legged creatures access to my living space. It's an older house and it has settled, the windows and doors just aren't as tight as they used to be.

So I compensate as best I can by laying a trail, inside and out of "bug killer". I do it each spring, and generally follow it up in the summer and fall. Bugs don't bother me in their natural habitat. If those grasshoppers want to live in the field across the street, I say "more power to them!". If those ants and beetles and june bugs and spiders and crickets and other creepy crawlies want to live out in my yard or garden, well ... hey! Grass and plants are nature, insects are nature, I say let them live hand in hand.

O.U.T.S.I.D.E!!!

Inside my house is not where I want to find something more than a creature that stands on two legs. Unless I finally give into the growing temptation and add a small four legged canine creature to my household. I'm the one that pays the rent on this domicile, not them and therefore - since they won't leave when asked - I say, "Die Bug, Die!".

Does this make me a bad person?

Eh! Sorry. Not really caring.

So ... here's what happens ... bugs come in ... they cross, of their own choosing, the barrier that I have invisibly erected around the perimeter of my living room, my kitchen, my hallway, my bedrooms and they believe in their little insect minds that they have it made, that they have survived. But they don't. With the exception of a pesky slug that kept finding ways around my barrier of salt, they all tend to die fairly quickly.

Now there are the occasional crickets and "doodle bugs" that have, over the years, been rescued by some youthful girlies (The same ones who screech and jump up onto the couch, chairs, counters, etc. if a spider looks at them askance from the doorway 10 feet away, but we won't mention that now, will we?) and tossed back to their natural habitat of the outdoors. But these are few, and far between. Generally ... the bugs ... they die.

Nothing could make me happier.

Yet, here's where my mind has wandered this morning (yes, there is actually a reason, a thought behind these words I'm putting to paper - computer - whatever - this morning) and has me writing.

Why do bugs die with their feet in the air?

Seriously.

They're crawling along and their time is up and they somehow manage to flip themselves over onto their backs, sticking their tiny little legs up into the air. Crickets do it. "Doodle bugs" do it. Those little black "I don't know WHAT the heck they are but they annoy the crap out of me" bugs do it. They all do. Why?

I realize that this may seem like a childish question, but can someone tell me why?

Today we have the wonderful internet and we can "Ask Jeeves" these questions, or we can do a "Google Search" and look up these subjects and find the answers to our questions. Children are always asking the "why?" question ... "Why is the sky blue?" ... "Why is fire yellow?" ... "Why do feet smell, even when you've been walking in water puddles?" Yes, they are always looking for answers. It's what keeps them learning, keeps them searching - expanding their horizons. As much as we grownups dread the "why?" questions, children need to ask them and we need to respond with as much truth and information as we deem their youthful minds can accept, given their ages and maturity.

Yet we don't always have the answers. Hence falling back on the wonderful world of "Ask Jeeves", Google, and Wikipedia, et. al. Hopefully answers can be located there. However, we didn't always have the internet. What did parents do before the internet? Lie? Make up answers? Continually go to the library?

Play the chase game of "Go ask your father", which would, inevitably result in the "Go ask your mother" response?

Books were where the fountain of knowledge lay during those *mumblemumble* years ago. I remember when my parents got our first set of World Book Encyclopedias. This huge selection of green and white books that came filled with all this information. They also got the series of Childcraft books that went along with the encyclopedias - books filled with stories, music, poems, crafts, useful learning tools for children. The standard answer to our "why?" questions in our house for my brother and I became ... "Did you look it up?" Placed on the "easily reachable by childish hands" shelving in our family's den, the encyclopedias took their place with the dictionaries and other reference books that my parents had collected over the years. During the school year, these books would wander from those shelves to the couch or the bedroom or the table ... where ever homework was being done or answers were being seeked.

A couple years after the arrival of the encyclopedias came four books that were truly fun and amazing ... they were the "Tell Me Why" books. These books were great. You could literally look up questions and find answers. At the time, I accepted them for what they were - something fun and interesting to read or to find answers. I was a kid. I didn't realize what a book such as that entailed - the formatting of questions into sections to find easier, the compilation of thousands of childish questions and their answers written for youthful understanding.

For me, and my little brother, they were just really cool books - paper and words bound together. From our earliest days, we both loved to read and these books were not only interesting and entertaining, but also filled with facts and knowledge and information. How wonderfully sneaky were our parents to provide something to teach us while we were entertained, yet be safe and secure in the fact that the information we were receiving was not something damaging, something that was not wholesome, was not bad for us?

Today, children have questions and are sent to the computer, to the internet, to these websites that may contain the information that they need but may also provide further information that youthful minds simply don't need to have. This frightens me in so many ways for our children of today. Make no mistake, I love the world of the internet and I make use of it daily. I love the quick access to the information that I desire. During times of homework, projects (gotta LOVE those science projects, history projects, geography projects), and just plain questions - the internet has provided a source of answers for my girlies when all my brain could come up with is "I don't know". However, it is my responsibility as the adult to make certain that they are accessing sites that provide only the information that they need and not something that young eyes, minds, and hearts do not need to witness or read.

That's a responsibility I don't take lightly. I just wish that more adults would think the same way because it breaks my heart when I hear a five year old discussing topics in graphic fashion. A five year old should not know the complete details of how a baby is made and how it arrives to this world. A seven year old does not need to learn the details of how sex is performed. An eight year old should not have access to information on how to construct a weapon or bomb.

What's my point about this, you ask? Simply this ... even though it is easier to just send a child to the computer when they ask the "why?" question, we can't just allow them to do that. We, as adults, need to know what they are reading is appropriate for the ages and maturity level that they have acheived. We need to allow our children to remain children and not allow them to become tiny grown ups. We need to remember that children should be playing outside with a rubber ball, with an umbrella in the rain - making their feet stinky in the puddles.

Of course, this is just my viewpoint. Children are going to ask questions ... it's just a natural part of childhood. It's up to us to determine the response that they receive, the amount of information that they need to have to satisfy their curiosity. Shouldn't we know where the answers to our children's questions are coming from?

Personally, I'd rather answer the question of "why do bugs die with their feet in the air?" than "why did Timmy shoot our teacher?".

Maybe because there the answers to some questions don't come in a book, or the internet because they are questions that children simply shouldn't have to ask. But then, maybe that's just me.

Oh ... btw ... according to John Meyer, entomolgy professor at North Carolina State University, it is believed that bugs die with their feet in the air is not intended but rather, a result of the fact that the insecticide affects their nervous system and so their coordination declines and they are unable to right themselves if they get turned over due to a breeze, a fall, a bump from another bug, etc. I should probably feel sorry for them that I am affecting their nervous system ... but ... I'm not.