And Now, The Rest (Or At Least More) Of The Story

When we last convened, Mrs. Hillbilly Mom was hearing things behind her back. Not like malicious workplace rumors about herself. She's RETIRED, by cracky! No, she was hearing slight rustling noises in her (lighted) dark basement lair. The source was not discovered before she went to bed.

Huh. The next day, when I descended to my lair at 2:38 p.m., I was shocked to see my office in disarray. Okay. Not exactly shocked, because the usual state of my office IS disarray. But now, the disarray was in disarray. One spot in particular. The pull-out shelf of my old gray metal office desk. I don't use that desk. Not in the Mansion, where Farmer H built me one in the corner as I requested, out of smooth butcher-block-look countertop.

This gray desk came from Farmer H's old workplace. They were throwing it out! I clamored for it, and it served me well in my $17,000 house. Once we moved here, and Farmer H finished the basement (finished as in framed out the rooms and put up walls and painted them, not finished as in poured the concrete in a hole in the ground), Farmer H and his buddy, Buddy, nearly gave themselves hernias moving that gray desk in. The Pony, once he was of an age to use a computer-type learning toy, claimed it as his own. Now it is mainly piled with remnants of The Pony's gaming DVDs.

Anyhoo...I have an old radio/CD player that I use to listen to basketball games when Newmentia boys and girls play in a tournament. It rests on that gray metal desk shelf, and I unplug my printer and hook it up. Beside it is a stack of things that I haven't gotten around to throwing away, or that I might possibly need one day. Until the hoarder TV show invades my space and tells me I don't. Here's the shelf and radio.

As you can see, I haven't gotten around to tossing those Valentines that my menfolk gave me. Oh, don't think there's still candy in there! I just haven't thrown them away yet. That might be a good five-second project tonight, putting them in the tall kitchen trash bag that holds my empty Diet Coke bottles.

Anyhoo...those Valentines were not askew when I went to bed. Only when I returned the next afternoon. AND the base they had been sitting on, a green plastic tub that my best ol' ex-teaching buddy Mabel had sent us Christmas cookies and candy in one year, was gone! Let the record show that the green tub had long ago been emptied and washed, and was acting as a repository for some items I had carried from upstairs down to my office. A couple of errant check stubs, and envelopes that might have been important at the time, and once here, a printout or two of the boys college schedules, topped off with a manila envelope holding receipts for possible tax purposes.

That green tub was not so much gone as tumbled ass-over-teakettle to the floor.

Seriously! What caused that? I know it wasn't a cricket! A cricket is no ant, capable of moving a rubbertree plant. And the noises I heard did not make me think a rhino was roving around behind me.

Let the record show that as I gasped and walked over to look at that debacle...a cricket strode purposefully across the floor and under my corner desk that holds New Delly.

I know that's not possible. Right...?