The Calendar

We always (always, ALWAYS!) have a hanging wall calendar in our kitchen by the phone. It is MESSAGE CENTRAL. I don’t care about your Dayplanner, your PalmPilot, your classroom agenda book. If it isn’t on the kitchen calendar...it ain’t happening. Needless to say, we start penciling in notes on the NEXT year around September, so I always shop early for the next year’s kitchen calendar ( there IS the yearly offering from our mortgage loan guy, but he tends toward little magnetic refrigerator calendars, which are not the same thing at all). This year, I got lucky (or so I thought). Late last summer, the U-Colorado Alumni folks sent me a gorgeous full color hanging calendar with scenes from the campus. Perfect. Calendar dilemma solved.

Until yesterday, when I started transferring over some notes and pre-arranged substitute dates, and discovered, much to my dismay, that the lovely full-color photos of the campus acted as carbon paper (do they still MAKE carbon paper?), and transferred everything from January to February, everything from February to March. This was not acceptable. No way, no how. So, TODAY, on the second of January, we put out an all-points search for a new calendar. I briefly considered “365 Knitting Patterns”, but bought that only for fun, and for the bill-paying-desk...the desktop style calendar does not work for the kitchen. We also rejected (thankyouverymuch) the “365 Sex Positions” calendar. While it was amusing, somehow we don’t think 2 teenaged boys in the house need any extra help in the imagination department. What to do? I considered borrowing, PERMANENTLY, Isaac’s carefully chosen “The Hobbit – the original illustrations” calendar, but kept looking.

Luckily, Dave and I both found alternatives, concurrently although in different places. I found “Cats and Bible Verses” at the grocery store, and bought it, for lack of anything better (although our own cats are FAR cuter, and I'm not quite sure how the 23rd Psalm relates to felines). At the same time, in another part of the city, Dave found PINK FLAMINGOES, and as flamingoes are my secret vice, he figured that was perfect. And it was. A pencil test proved that the pink ink did not, indeed, transfer to the next month, and we will experience pink birds for the next 12 months.

Why, you may ask, if flamingoes are my vice, did Alex and Isaac team up to give Mom a full sized Canadian Goose decoy for Christmas? Life’s little mysteries. But they did. Even now, it stands proudly in the dining room with red and green bows about its stately neck, seeming to be just temporarily stranded as it waits for warmer weather up North to call it home again.