Thursday

You know what the really sad moment in my grand survey of sympathy cards? I was standing in the aisle at Hallmark thinking snarky thoughts about the universally weak selection of sympathy cards available and generally being annoyed and then I noticed that the woman next to me was looking through the same cards and crying.

The store wasn't exactly sensitive to the fact that some of their customers weren't there to peruse jokey birthday cards. It was a sea of pink. The whole damn store. And they were all good cards, shiny and sparkly and bright, even the confirmation cards were decorative. I had to really search for the gray area. The most masculine cards in the building were the ones in the sympathy section, these cards all looked cheap and drab. Did you know I saw one that was illustrated with a single black tulip? If I wasn't in tears before I opened that envelope I would probably end up needing to be sedated by the time I got the envelope open. They all seemed designed to be looked at once and discarded, created to be express a pin prick of sadness as unmemorable as possible.

There was not a single sympathy card marked "humorous". Hasn't Hallmark ever heard of gallows humor?

It was a giant relief to finally settle on a damn card. It meant I could stop thinking about death and turn my attention to murder. It was time to go and buy a very powerful poison to kill just about every naturally occurring creature that have the bad luck to naturally occur in my back yard. I check IDs and if you aren't on the guest list, you gotta go and if you won't go on your own, I'll kill you. My own home made Home Land Security. Michael Chertoff would be proud.

The only insects I want to see have work permits, you don't got no job, you don't got no business in my yard. It's how it is. Bumble bees are all right, Lady Bugs are all right, Daddy Long legs are okay, as long as they stay outside, garter snakes are all right if they wear reflective clothing. Spiders are allowed as long as they eat mosquitoes and avoid me. Anything with more than four legs that venture inside are subject to death-by-house cat or vacuum cleaner. They both leave me satisfied that a lesson was learned.

You know the best thing about the advent of digital cameras? You no long have to catch whatever it is you think may be eating your stuff, you don't have to interact with it, transport it or deal with disposing of it. You can take your camera to the nursery and have them identify the little bastards for you or you can take a picture of the damage and have them tell you what did it and how to best fatally visit your revenge upon them..

I think something is all ready eating my plants. On some of them the old leaves are round and pretty but the new leaves are sharp and pointy, even the newborn leaves. Does foliage do that? Start off looking one way and then as it ages look another way? I mean, they don't even look like they belong to the same plant.