I wonder if it's MY town?

Tony's Kansas City directed my attention to this little gem of information: Nelson-Atkins museum featured on "Wife Swap".

The museum part isn't what I found to be really interesting, though. It's this: "The show will include a family of three boys with a passion for sports and paintball from a small town near Kansas City. The swapped wife who takes over this brood is from San Francisco and is Oxford-educated."

I wonder if it's my small town? Or my former small town? It could be! Although, the way word gets around my community, I think my friend Tracy would have known about such a thing and told me. Nothing gets past Tracy.

Maybe I'll at least recognize the small town.

When Cliff worked on Friday nights, I usually watched Wife Swap, even though it's staged and silly. Now that he's off Fridays, it's pretty hard to get him to allow that particular show to be seen in our house. I'm going to try and get him to make an exception tonight.

Speaking of Cliff, he goes back to the 4:30 to 3 A.M. schedule next week, and we're going to try something different with meals. Since he'll be sleeping until 11 A.M. or so, he's going to drink coffee for a while and then we'll eat dinner (that's lunch to most of you, but it's our main meal of the day). Shortly before he leaves for work at 3:30 P.M., he'll eat breakfast. OK, maybe we won't call it breakfast. But it's going to be his usual breakfast fare, which alternates between oatmeal, Cream of Wheat, chocolate Malt-O-Meal and shredded wheat. He'll take the same type lunch to work as always, which normally consists of something left over from previous meals that he can warm up in the microwave.

Pioneer Woman gave me some food for thought yesterday: “If something happens and I don’t blog about it…did it really happen at all?”

Hmmm.

This and that

Yesterday Cliff started his new schedule, working four ten-hour days per week. If you count his commute time and add in the half-hour for lunch, he's actually gone twelve hours. I woke up briefly when he was crawling into bed at 3:45 A.M. Here's hoping he's able to sleep at least until 10 o'clock this morning.

I know it seems like a terrible schedule, but here's the thing: If it doesn't work out for Cliff and Tony (the guy he rides to work with) they can go right back to the old schedule. Cliff feels it's worth giving up a couple of hours at home per day in order to get a whole extra day off each week. The hours, though, are pretty atrocious. So we shall see. When I got up this morning I woke Sadie up and carried her bed into the living room, shutting the bedroom door behind me.

Sadie has all sorts of insecurities that make me laugh: One that really puzzles me is her irrational fear of the furnace. Because of this, I can't put her bed near a furnace grate: the minute the furnace lights (and it lights so quietly, I don't hear it... but she does), she's out of there; let's not even talk about when the fan starts blowing warm air! One would assume she'd get used to it, but she hasn't. Strange thing is, the air conditioner blowing through the same grates doesn't bother her at all. Go figure.

Surfing across the Internet, I read that coyotes are killing dogs just across the Missouri/Kansas line. Now that's scary! I used to see coyotes and hear them howling out here all the time. These days, not so much. I guess they moved to Johnson County, Kansas. I once wrote a poem about a coyote:

THE COYOTE
Donna Wood

In the pasture, on a hill,
A coyote stands, alert and still.
He fixes me with stony stare,
As if I shouldn't trespass there.
I've heard him howl, with all his clan,
While darkness creeps across the land.
My house is not that far away,
And yet, the coyote families play.
(Civilized, we well may be,
But coyotes roam here, wild and free;
And when a train goes whistling by
I hear their eerie victory cry.)
He looks awhile; then trots away:
While I stand watching, he won't stay.
But in the twilight he'll be here ---
For I've had poultry disappear

As I sat typing this post, I happened to remember the cordless phone in the bedroom and retrieved it. That's something else I'll have to learn to do on a daily basis, with a day sleeper around. Or maybe there's a way to turn off the ringer?

I guess that's all the random stuff I have this morning. Have a great day!