Barnaclebutt

We got home yesterday from our wonderful vacation and today it is time to pay for it.

Right before we left we had the incident with the skunk, then my washer flooded the laundry room twice, so I pretty much wiped up all the water with dirty towels and then fled for Santa Barbara.

It was beautiful, the ocean, the flowers... I didn't spend a second thinking about what might be percolating in my laundry room. However, this morning as I unpack and shake sand out of all and sundry I am faced with the fact that damp skunk towels do not just go away (If I only had one wish...).

Still, I am ah, "excited" isn't really the right word, let's go with motivated. Yes, I am motivated to clean out the laundry room and see if I can see the floor once more. Maybe I'll even work my way down the hall and tackle the (also damp) pile of clothes my daughters discarded into the furnace room.

Aaaaand we're back!

You want to know what I love?
The smell of my children after they have been basted with sunscreen, marinated in the ocean, and spent the day toasting in the sun!
Delicious to my taste!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

I can't believe I haven't posted pictures from Ellie's birthday! Someone slap my hand.

1. Jonathan puts his poker face to work at the 4th grade "Gold Rush Day."2. Katie is lovely at her 8th grade graduation.3. Maddie opening her new MacBook for her 16th birthday.4. Grandma Diana visits from San Diego.5. Gotta share how lovely the fruits growing in the front mini-orchard are. We have plums, apricots and apple.

And finally, here are some of our 216 Fourth of July photos. Thank goodness I finally learned how to make a collage. We are staying at a great beach house with our new(ish) friends, the Vanhoven family.

We went to watch the fireworks show down by the beach and Marc got us the PERFECT table to eat dinner and take in the show. It was so good!

You can clickity click on this collage to get a better look at the photos.

artistic photo of my tools for deskunking

6. Squirt natures miracle Skunk Oder Remover, available at Petco, all over everything. Yes, everything! Then wash your hands with it.

Ah, it was so awful. At 11pm Marc made the executive decision that we simply couldn't sleep in our skunkafied home so we invaded my parents. They may be the most gracious people on the planet. Not only did they let us smell up their guest rooms, they showed up the next day unexpectedly to help us clean.

And now, three days later, the smell is almost entirely gone. Mostly. I hope.

I have to have the worst assortment of towels ever. Years ago, when Marc and I were first married we had a nice set of lovely matching towels that were wedding gifts from people who loved us and had checked our Macy's registry and bought us towels. Lovely lovely matching towels. The joy.

But while we were living in our first little studio (fold out of the wall bed, I am not even kidding), I left those sweet defenseless towels in the common laundry area and they were towel napped. I was naive enough to write a note begging for their release and left it in the laundry room but, as you may have guessed, there was no mercy.

And that was the beginning of my towel mismatch misery. Probably that was so long ago that I can't really blame all my towel woes on the incident, but I've never really recovered.

I tried buying matching white towels that I thought I could bleach and keep white, but don't do that because it does not work. Now I have a bunch of white towels that feel nice but look dirty the minute they come out of the dryer and no amount of treatments make a different.

Once I worked at Williams and Sonoma and so I acquired their lovely matching dish towels, but they are super worn out now and I just keep using them. Dish towels at my house run the risk of scary encounters with 409 with bleach anyway; they all end up speckled.

Once I bought lovely fancy company type towels to stage a house Marc built and when that was over I took them home and SWORE that they would stay nice and only come out for company and that worked for awhile until they turned up in the laundry one day with oil paint all over them.

When I interrogated the children Katie admitted that she had used them to protect her desk from getting messy while she painted. "Why! Why these ones?" I cried. And she told me sweetly that she picked ones that she thought I didn't like because I never use them.

See?

No, I don't know what is wrong with me. I don't know why I'm writing about this. Plus even when we get some nice new towels I have to keep all of the old ones (because is why) so the entire collection, as it were, never looks lovely matchy anyway.

The end.

Here is my Jonathan.
And my Ellie.