The Ark is not in my laundry room, I was trying to be funny, but I am fielding offers on the Holy Grail.

When Randy and I were in China, our group visited several government stores that sold items specific to the region. Pearls, jade, silk, and embroidery. These detours were not optional, despite the renowned flexibility of the Chinese government, and they weren't short. Each one was essentially a giant warehouse filled with commissioned Chinese salespeople instructed to SELL ALL THE STUFF NOW and a bunch of mumbly confused white people trying to figure out if four hundred dollars is a fair price for a jade horse. And if four hundred dollars isn't a fair price, is it worth that much to escape to the bus and grab a nap while all the other white people pick out seventy-dollar dragon pendants under heavy duress? Depends on how tired you are, I guess, and how many jade horses you already have at home. I personally own zero jade horses but please, hold your applause.

The silk tour was actually really incredible because we got to watch the entire silk harvesting process from cocoon to loom. I learned about caterpillars and cocoons and silk just like every other American second grader, right, but apparently my second grade brain wasn't equipped to fully grasp the concept that a worm seriously spins a single 1,600 yard fiber into a ball that he then lives in for awhile until someone comes along to unfurl it and turn it into a robe. I guess I went ahead and thought silk really came from recycled plastic bottles, maybe. Or obnoxiously superior cotton plants.

The tour ended, predictably enough, in a store. In addition to literally any clothing item you could possibly desire, there was an entire room dedicated to bedding. This is where Randy and I naturally gravitated since we each already have like six silk robes (no) and ten days into our sixteen-day trip we were looking for something obnoxiously heavy and awkwardly sized to carry around on our backs and potentially leave on a bus (no).

I don't know why we decided we should buy all new bed linens in China. I guess it started with the silk comforter. Over the years we've had a hell of a time finding a down comforter that's the right weight- no matter what we buy it always ends up being too heavy.

I just realized what I typed so I'm going to type it again, only this time without the gauzy bullshit naivety:

"Over the years we've had a hell of a time finding a down comforter designed to insulate Yellowstone campers in February that's the right weight- no matter what we buy it always ends up being too heavy because we live in Phoenix, Arizona where it's like a hundred degrees all the time and anything heavier than a goddamn Kleenex is rightfully going to get kicked onto the floor in an unconscious suffocating fight to regulate body temperature at three in the morning.

So the silk comforter. Okay, apparently sometimes the silkworms get all crazy and upside-downy and they spin these wild cocoons with more than one thread. Those cocoons can't be unwound so instead they're soaked and then pulled into a fine silk web that's added to lots of other fine silk webs until it magically morphs into a comforter.

Our guide, Ming, was all about the silk comforters.

"They are so wonderful," she gushed, "The silk is so soft and so light, it breathes and so it's never too heavy. It's like a cloud, I have one on my bed and I love it so much."

I was falling asleep standing up just talking to her about it. We explained about Phoenix and heat and summer and literally almost dying every single night of the year and Ming nodded knowingly. As she should, right, not having ever been to Phoenix and having no working knowledge of the Fahrenheit system and also probably totally not making fifteen percent off the top of this particular junket.

Surprise, we bought a silk comforter. The answer to our idiotic prayers. It was satisfyingly heavy and awkward to carry, though, so it met all of our purchase requirements.

Having successfully graduated from the comforter section to the sheet section, I was personally ready to call it a day and take my well-earned nap in the bus. But Ming, acting purely out of concern, I'm sure, pointed out that the benefits of a silk comforter would be completely negated if we just swaddled said comforter in our everyday cotton linens, my god. We might as well just cover each other in duct tape before bed.

I was admittedly a big fan of what we already had going on at home linen-wise: monogrammed sheets and pillow shams and a great mustard yellow quilt from Restoration Hardware, all wedding gifts. But I was exhausted and not carrying enough so Ming was making pretty solid sense. Randy and I began perusing the comforter cover displays.

"Some of these are crazy," I distinctly remember muttering.

"I know," Randy's pretty sure he replied, "Where would that ever work?" he probably asked, pointing to a blood red duvet cover smothered in bright orange flowers.

And then we both saw it. The duvet cover of our dreams. The creaminess of the gold, the subtle interaction of the accent colors... Yes, it was bolder than our usual taste, but shit, man, sometimes you gotta branch out of your comfort zone and take a chance on romance, you feel me?

Was what Ming said. In abbreviated English. And without the early-90s slang and no swearing.

So we did it. We took the plunge and bought a 100% silk duvet cover and shams of controversial coloring to go with our 100% silk comforter. For our normal monogamous, middle-aged, heterosexual life. In our taupe and coffee colored house. In the middle of a desert.

I think it took me twenty minutes to realize this was a Bad Idea upon returning home. Not including jet lag. Including jet lag it took three and a half weeks. I took the whole noisy parcel and I shoved it up in the laundry room cabinet because if it was anywhere I could SEE it, I would get a migraine and probably die on the floor.

And there it remained, up in the laundry room cabinet, carelessly yet artfully hidden like the Ark of the Covenant, until last week when Randy went looking for the box his cell phone came in. I could've avoided this whole disaster if I had just admitted at the onset that I threw that stupid box away two years ago, but no, instead I let him prowl around the house, opening and shutting doors willy-nilly, just wreaking havoc EVERYWHERE. I heard him hit the tell-tale cellophane bag and I reflexively ran back to the kitchen to be closer to the Excedrin.

I have to squint when I look at this picture. I hope all the bedroom lights are off so I don't have to take a Dramamine before I get ready for bed tonight.

I can't explain what happened, I honestly can't. I posted this on Facebook and was instantly inundated with WTFs from everyone I know. Emily said my bedroom looks like a 90s rap video. Eden wants to know if I'm opening a bordello, and my sweet daughter-in-law tried to give me the benefit of the doubt; she wondered if maybe it was packaged so I couldn't see the whole thing, maybe like a 4" x 6" swatch.

No.

There are no rational excuses here.

You know the sage hiding behind the screen in The Golden Child who's supposedly like 700 years old and her mother was raped by a dragon? I'm sleeping in that psychic dragon-woman's bed now.

Kelly remarked that she liked how all the bedspread Koi fish appeared to be floating in space. "Space Koi", she said. Which was so unerringly awesome she made a Space Koi tumblr. Go look. She's a Space Koi genius. And she's way better at photo editing than I am; I'm still trying to morph this NASA helmet onto this giant fish and she's like four ahead.

Despite the headaches and the mild nausea, Randy is still a big fan. So I don't know what to do. We can't sleep under the comforter, obviously, because we'll die; we might as well curl up underneath a Chevy Suburban. I can't look at it much longer because I haven't learned how to make one of those boxes you use to view a solar eclipse and my eyes are literally starting to cross. I got the bed half-made this morning before I had to lie down, which seems ironic.

Oh, good, here's the best part:

There's a seam that runs directly across the middle of the bed. Right through the... tentacles. So not only did we somehow purchase bedwear befitting an Inuit pimp? But apparently we did it in a Chinese government-run seconds outlet.

Cardigan World has some pretty good deals, don't laugh.

A couple of weeks ago at the grocery store I picked up one of those days-of-the-week pill keepers like your great-uncle and your drug dealer have, the long strip of plastic pockets with the days of the week on them so you can allocate your daily vitamins and pills in advance and have them all in one handy place. As opposed to losing an entire open Costco-sized bottle of Centrum for Women under the passenger seat of your car where you occasionally snatch for one when you happen to be both at a red light and feeling particularly low on B7.

I had actually wanted to bring my grandmother's pill keeper home with me after she passed away because I thought it would be a daily sentimental reminder. I was wrong, though; according to every single person I've ever met, using your deceased grandmother's medication holder isn't "sentimental" as much as it is "breathtakingly morbid" and I was rather harshly ordered NOT to store my Claritin in the same plastic pocket where my grandmother once kept her nitroglycerin.

Fine then, I bought my own. And I felt self-conscious and rickety and like a giant hypochondriac doing it-- I mean please, right? I need a pill organizer the same way I needed a retainer made out of paperclips when I was eight. In third grade my next door neighbor and I came up with a plan to break each others' arms so we could get plaster casts. We didn't go through with it, of course, but lack of follow through isn't the problem: I HAD THE IDEA. THAT'S the problem.

So I get home with my pill keeper and I start bustling around grabbing vitamins and shit out of the pantry, and Randy swings through the kitchen and sees me and he's all, "???" And I'm all, "!!!" And he's all, "Yeah, I'm leaving now because I can't pronounce an asterisk but don't touch my BC Headache Powder." And I was all, "YOU BETTER FEED YOUR LEECHES BEFORE YOU LEAVE."

I popped open Su through Sa and started assigning pills to days; fiber tablets, linty Centrum I scraped off the floorboards, vitamin E capsules the size of quail eggs, a bunch of Cipro for a UTI (you're welcome), vitamin C, some Anacin (don't tell Randy), assorted allergy medication, and before I knew it all seven of my plastic compartments were jammed.

JAMMED. I tried to slam Tuesday closed and a fish oil capsule exploded.

So obviously I ran out and bought a larger pill organizer. Larger. A larger one. It came with a free bottle of Geritol and a coupon for five dollars off at Cardigan World. I could store a portable breathing machine in Wednesday and still have room for an adrenaline shot on Friday. Deep inside me a little girl squinting needlessly through her mother's reading glasses rejoiced.

Randy happened to walk back in as I was repositioning everything and stopped to watch.

"Hey, are those One-A-Day Men's? And these," he pointed, "these are for joint pain. You don't have joint pain."

"I might have joint pain."

"You should have told me," he started, and I grabbed my pharmacy and ran out of the room before he could slap a leech on me.

The whole system lasted exactly one week; I lost interest when it was time to refill everything again. Now I'm back to eating Centrum off the car floor. It's probably for the best, it was a really weird week. I mean yeah, my UTI went away and I was completely allergy-free, sure, but I also started growing hair on my back and my joints felt all soggy inside.

A Tragedy of Poultry. In Three Parts.

Part 1: February, 2008. I plop a slippery, naked, happy-go-lucky whole chicken onto my chicken grilling contraption and rub its chilly body down with sea salt and freshly ground pepper. The chicken giggles. "That tickles!" laughs the chicken. Very gently, I separate the skin from the chicken's body and softly massage garlic-infused butter over its back and legs. The chicken understandably dozes off during this massage and so I'm quiet when I carry it outside to the waiting preheated barbecue. As I open the lid the chicken wakes up, straightens its neck nub, and yawns.

"See ya later, Chicken!" I sing.

"After while, Not A Chicken!" the chicken sings back, waving a bumpy wing. "Thanks for the rub down! See you in about an hour when I'm golden brown and my juices run clear!"

Five minutes later: The barbecue is awash in flame. I grab a potholder and throw open the lid but it's too late, it's a massacre.

I hurry the chicken inside to better assess the damage.

"What happened out there?" I ask.

The chicken coughs. "I don't know," it moans, "things were good, you know, warm... and then... and then I think I exploded?"

Through cracks in the chicken's blackened skin I see sticky raw chicken flesh.

"Am I... can you still eat me?"

"I'm pretty sure that's a no," I tell it, "I'm pretty sure you'll kill me if I try."

"I won't! I wouldn't! I promise!" Bloody smoke billows from its neck hole.

"Yeah... I think you will. I think I have to put you in the Big Trash Can Outside. It's garbage day tomorrow so it shouldn't be that bad. And I'll weight the lid down with something," I add for decency's sake, "to keep the cats out."

The chicken sighs wetly, filling the kitchen with a dark fog.

"Okay," it relents. "And hey, I'm really sorry about all this."

"Don't even worry about it," I say, carrying the chicken out to the garage. "We've got some leftover pizza." I pry the chicken from the grill tray and set it on top of the trash before putting a couple of bricks on the lid. As I walk back into the house I can barely hear the chicken crying.

Part 2: April, 2009. I grab the grill tray out of the pantry where it's been sitting for more than a year. I cut a chicken free from its plastic bag and toss it in the sink, scraping out its assorted organs as I go. "Hey," the chicken pipes up, "Aren't you going to use any of that stuff?" I toss what I presume to be a heart, a liver, a gallbladder and what, a lung, maybe, into the garbage disposal. "Because it's kind of a waste," the chicken says over the grinding motor, "some of that stuff is pretty good." I grab a pair of scissors; we've got some chicken skin that has to come off. "Whoa, what are we doing? What are we... hey!" I trim a healthy wedge of skin from the top and bottom of the chicken and cram it into the disposal. "Fire hazard," I explain. "Th...th... that's okay," the chicken replies, shivering.

Setting the chicken on the counter, I pour sea salt into its cavity. The chicken's ensuing screams fill the kitchen. "I'm all raw in there!" it wails. "Can't you do that on the outside?" I ignore the snuffling of the chicken and attempt to jam it on the roasting spit thing. It takes like four tries because the chicken's opening isn't big enough. On try number three the chicken loses consciousness.

It wakes up as I'm opening the barbecue. "Wait," it mumbles, disconcerted, "Don't I at least get a butter massage?"

"Too flammable," I say, "We're going to have to count on your natural juices for flavor."

The chicken attempts a shaky thumbs up with its neck nub. "I won't let you down!"

Five minutes later: The chicken let me down. I grab it and hustle it into the house.

"Son of a bitch," I mutter. "What the hell happened out there?"

"I... I don't know," the chicken moaned. "Things seemed to be going pretty well, but then all of a sudden..."

"You exploded?"

"Maybe? I'm not really sure. It felt pretty bad, though."

I upend the grill tray over the sink and give it a good shake. The chicken slides loose with an unceremonious plop! and slides neck down into the drain hole.

"I think maybe this part is good right here," the chicken mumbles hopefully into a sponge, gesturing to an upper thigh. "This part isn't hurting me." Ignoring it, I grab it with a wad of paper towels and head out to the Big Trash Can. Trash day isn't for four days. And I'm out of bricks.

Part 3: Two weeks ago. The whole chicken on the counter bobs its neck nub with excitement as I draw near. "Hi! I am just so excited to be here, I can't even stand it." I open a utensil drawer under the counter. "Oooh, what are you getting? A baster? Oooh, oooh! Or one of those flavor injectors? Because I've heard good things!" I grab a mallet. And a cleaver. And close the drawer. "Wow," says the chicken. "That looks a little overkill."

Anything else that chicken has to say it says to itself, presumably in its Happy Place, as I proceed to chop and smash its body into manageable, less likely to explode pieces. I mercilessly trim the skin and cover everything halfheartedly in salt and pepper. I dump the chicken on the grill and make sure all the burners are set to LOW. Right before I close the lid I see the chicken attempting to roll its traumatized pieces into seven separate fetal positions.

I sit inside, eyes narrowed. Waiting. Waiting. Nothing. Everything looks fine out the window, situation normal. I let my guard down, stupidly, and concentrate on salad. Suddenly and without warning the house fills with the smell of burning plastic; running to the window I see that the yard is full of smoke. Had a Chicken Jedi Master been over and waiting for dinner he would have felt a great disturbance in The Force.

When Randy emerges from his backyard reconnaissance mission, he explains that the barbecue somehow became so hot that all of the hard plastic control knobs melted off and formed little rubbery pools on the patio.

We silently agree not to discuss the chicken.

I now live in a state of perpetual fear. Fear that one day I'll find myself in a dark parking garage or a drizzly back alley and my peripheral vision will catch the silhouette of a shadowy figure reflected on a wall, a figure slowly approaching; a hulking, heaving chicken, wearing a tight trench coat and hellbent on revenge.

Makes me glad we're not really beef people.

See also: Rabies.

The first thing Randy and I generally do when we get to Mexico is take our giant hairy dog down to the ocean so he can throw his fat ass around in the water for ten minutes to get the smell of rest stop off him. The Jake takes off down the shoreline like a racehorse but he can realistically only swim for maybe forty, forty-five seconds at a stretch before he starts whining the Lord's Prayer and trying to drown himself. Ten minutes of this, of hauling himself in and out of the water like a crippled walrus, and Jake will lie motionless on the cold tile floor of the condo for thirty-six consecutive hours. It's exactly what I'm trying to get out of the pet/owner relationship; a dog that doesn't flinch when I use his furry comatose flank to brush the sand off my feet. For three straight days.

So when we were in Mexico a few weeks ago the first thing we did was change into our bathing suits and follow our dog down to the water. No time like the present, right, my filthy feet aren't going to brush themselves off. On the way we noticed a couple of tiny jellyfish sprawled out on the shore. Unlike the larger pale pink jellies I grew up avoiding in Florida, these guys are hard to miss because they're bright, bright blue. It's not uncommon to see them periodically in Rocky Point-- they'll move in with one tide and move out with the next-- but I've never had any trouble with them. In the first place, they're really small. Quarter-sized harmless blobs, really. Secondly, they absolutely suck at camouflage. I don't know, it's just hard to be intimidated by a button-sized glob floating at me that I can point out and laugh at from five feet away. Pshaw, nature. Pshaw, I say.

And this swimming excursion wasn't any different than it usually is; Randy repeatedly coaxed Jake out of his comfort depth to force him into churning his fat legs off the ocean floor, I repeatedly convinced Jake not to give up and sink lethargically under the surface like that quitter in Open Water, and none of us saw any jellyfish. We got out once we reached Jake's exercise threshold and noticed a whole family standing on the shore, all of them staring worriedly at us and at the water.

"Jellyfish!" Someone yelled, pointing. "There are jellyfish out there!" We walked over to explain that yes, we'd seen a couple of jellyfish on the shore but no, we hadn't had any trouble with them in the water.

"And anyway," I pshawed, "they're not a big deal." I told one concerned mother about the time I was stung by a jellyfish in the Gulf of Mexico when I was a kid. "Now that was a jellyfish," I said. "It wrapped itself around my stomach. I had scars for years."

It was July 4th and I was eight or nine. We'd been at the beach and I was wearing one of those one piece bathing suits with a hole cut in the middle that was popular for seventeen seconds, and a jellyfish wrapped its tentacles around my exposed middle.

"But these guys, nothing to worry about."

"Really?" someone else asked.

"Absolutely. I'm a jellyfish scientist. I have a degree in Advanced Jellyfish Studies from The University of Invertebrates."

I didn't say that.

What I said was: "Oh yeah. I mean, if you get stung by one you'll probably notice. But the bigger jellyfish, they're awful. I had to go to the hospital. The tentacles were wrapped around me like three times and they had to tear them off. So these?" I laughed with the carefree mirth of one happy to be alive. "No big deal."

And with that, solidly assured, the family made its way into the waves. All except for one little girl and Grandma. Two people apparently unimpressed by rock hard science. The girl looked up at me.

"You've been stung by a jellyfish before?"

"I have!" I told her. "When I lived in Florida. I was playing in the ocean and this giant jellyfish," I made a circle with my hands the size of a basketball, "came out of nowhere and LATCHED on to me. It wrapped its tentacles around my stomach and wouldn't let go. I tried to scream but a tentacle wrapped around my mouth and I couldn't. I went into shock. My dad had to drag me out of the ocean. He tried to rip the tentacles loose with his hands but the jellyfish wouldn't let go, it just laughed at him, this crazy jelly laugh. He ended up calling an ambulance and when I got to the hospital the doctors had to use a chainsaw to get it off me. I had these horrible, horrible scars around my waist for years, people assumed I'd been cut in half and then reattached. But these jellyfish," I laughed, "they don't even sting, they just tickle."

And then that sweet little girl did the dumbest thing she could have done: she gave me her hand so I could lead her into the surf.

"What's your name?" I asked, calf-deep, flush with the lofty confidence that only a true scientist can know.

"Nicole. But you can call me Danika."

And it was right then, right at that moment of trust meets adorable, that I felt it. A fucking jellyfish-- a fucking fluorescent blue jellyfish the size of a walnut-- somehow wrapped around my right leg with a wrath and a fury I can't explain. The shock of the impact caused me to hesitate for a split-second. My entire right leg from above my knee to mid-calf was now either completely entwined in electric barbed wire or those bastard jellyfish had transparent tentacles FOR DAYS. Nature: 117,000, Erin: -4. Well played, Earth.

Nicole/Danika, blissfully unaware that anything was wrong, kept pace into the surf, pulling on my hand. I reached down and dug underneath the tendrils with my free right hand, ripping them clear of my leg and rinsing the carnage in the surf.

The rest of the excursion sort of happened in a blur; my leg was being gnawed on by bees and fireants, Nicolika swam off to her family unharmed, I validated my reasoning for not having children by neglecting to disclose that the water was rife with poison, and I staggered back to shore.

Randy refused to carry me back to the condo. Jake also refused, but in his defense he was mostly unconscious.

"Wait here," Randy said as we hobbled closer to the complex, "I'll run in the bar and get a lime to squeeze on you."

A lime? That doesn't sound right. But maybe I'd been ditching the day they covered "The Panacea of Citrus Marination" at jellyfish college.

I was coming to terms with the idea of being ceviched when Randy emerged from the store with an aerosol can of industrial strength cleanser.

"They told me this was better," he explained, aiming the nozzle at my swollen leg.

"They told you what was better?"

"Windex." And suddenly my entire knee was covered in bleach scented foam.

"This isn't Windex! Windex is blue! And a liquid-- it doesn't foam!" I tried to read the label but it was in Spanish. Hazard symbols must be universal, though, because there were about eight of those on the back of the can.

"Is it helping?"

I was honestly waiting for my leg to crack off at the knee. "No. It's not helping. It's altering my DNA sequence, but it's not helping."

"This can't be that bad, "Randy said, blinking through the fumes. "Weren't you stung really badly as a kid? Weren't you in the ICU for like a week while they did skin grafts and transplants and exploratory surgery?"

"I don't really remember. I think I might have been grazed by something minor and parlayed it into a reason to leave the beach and go to the neighborhood pool where my friends were."

"So the scarring... "

"I tanned around some heart stickers."

I only tell you this because we're leaving for Yellowstone National Park tomorrow and there's a reasonable chance I will have the opportunity to chat with innocent fellow tourists about bears. I just want to put this out there right now: despite the fact that I was once licked by a gerbil, my imperious advice concerning wildlife attacks should under no circumstances be heeded.

I'm thinking I'll hang it in the attic.

I recently inherited a giant wind chime from my parents. I was over at their house helping clean out the garage and there it was underneath a half-empty bag of potting soil.

My dad saw me see it there, the wind chime, its mute brass tubes splayed out all over the place like a washed up robot squid.

"You want to take that home, you think?" he asked, a little sheepish. I snorted.

I bought the wind chime for my dad a few years ago. Father's Day, maybe. Or a birthday. My grandparents, his parents, had hung a wind chime in their yard decades ago; as they became ill our memories of time spent at their home grew sharper with the appreciation of better days and my dad started mentioning the sound of the chimes enough that I sought out a specialty store and bought him a close approximation of the same chimes.

I dragged the giant, clanking cardboard box into the family room and I could tell by my dad's face that he was hoping against hope it was three thousand pairs of cufflinks. He reached inside that box, pulled out a polished tentacle, and cringed as if I'd just thrown a church organ against the wall. It didn't help that when he pulled out the entire contraption it did, in fact, sound like I'd just thrown a church organ against the wall.

"I love it," he said, sprinting the whole apparatus outside to the patio. I think that's what he said; I can't be sure, I had my hands over my ears. My dad hung it roughly five inches from the arcadia door and prayed for some global catastrophe that would eliminate wind. Months later, his prayers dissappointingly unanswered, he took matters into his own hands and he wrapped a bungee cord around the chimes so they couldn't move.

I walked into their backyard and there they were, bound and gagged, listlessly drifting from side to side like a wind chime mime.

My dad saw my horror and tried to cover: "We love them," he started, "just... not when they move."

"Well sure," I snorted, "obviously. That's what wind chimes are all about-- looks." I half suspected that an inspection of my dad's car would unveil a trunk full of handcuffed songbirds.

"We have pretty much the same wind chime and we enjoy it!" I elbowed Randy for support. "Right? I mean, we really love ours. It's not right by the door, though, it's... " Huh. I couldn't remember. I looked at Randy. Randy turned his attention to the space just to the left of my head.

"Where is it? Where'd we hang it?" I asked him. I couldn't actually remember seeing it-- or hearing it-- since the patio remodel a year ago. "Do you remember?" Randy peeled some paint off the door jamb with his thumbnail and shrugged. I had a vision, then; a shallow grave, the desperate clink! a shovel full of dirt would make as it landed on a helpless brass tube.

Finding myself suddenly in menacing company, I dropped the subject. Several months later in an effort to mediate peace my parents presented Randy and me with a handmade brass whirligig designed to hang and spin in the wind. My love of shit that hangs off the house was now presumably sated, as was Randy's love of shit that shuts the fuck up. And it was nice, this little thing, with its silent little blue glass ball that spun silently down a brass spiral to nowhere, but it didn't heal my wounds.

Soon after, we had my parents over for dinner and I made sure the brass whirligig was front and center on the patio-- with a pointed modification-- but no one noticed. In hindsight they probably saw it and just assumed I'd finally come around, that I'd seen the crotchety light. The light where nothing is allowed to move and everything is better if it makes less noise.

Meanwhile, my parents' wind chime was inevitably making its slow, undignified crawl into the garage. It started one blustery night when my dad, frustrated that the entire bungeed contraption was banging manically against the house, took the whole thing down and laid it on the patio. Whereupon my mom immediately stepped on it in the dark and almost brass tubed herself into a concussion. That was the beginning of the end.

So last week when my dad asked me if I wanted to take his wind chime home with me, desperate as it looked lying there on the garage floor, cords all tangled, tubes all dented and akimbo, I didn't have a choice. I'd certainly asserted myself as a champion of noisy crap in the yard-- every day when Randy came home he was afraid he'd find a rope of monkeys and tambourines swinging from the patio ledge. Plus getting it away from my parents would be like helping Catherine Martin out of that well-- yeah, it might take some work to get her back to normal, but at least you've freed up some bungee cords.