OK, I live in a 107 year-old-house, meaning among other things that there are lots of holes and cracks and countless other sneaky places where animals can get in, either for a short visit or a long stay.  A bit of that I can deal with.  But I swear these days my life feels like an episode of Wild Kingdom , there are so many unwelcome creatures living with me.

In our four years in our current house, we have had:

--squirrels in the walls
--mice in the basement, naturally
--some sort of bird, maybe a dove, under the eaves
--mice in the trash compactor in the kitchen (gone after the kitchen renovation, thank goodness)
--carpenter bees on the front porch
--squirrels in a closet on the third floor
--wasps next to the porch swing
--one renegade squirrel who squeezed into a window on the third floor when the air conditioner unit did not provide as tight a seal as we assumed, causing our brave little renegade to leap into the guest room, run down the stairs, across the hall, and straight into Baby’s room where I was innocently changing his diaper.  I kid you not.  This episode was both a high point and low point of my adult life.

As faithful readers of this blog will know, we recently added the hideous drain flies to the list.  After lots of helpful suggestions from you all, I poured bleach down every drain, followed by boiling water.  (Actually, my mother—who happened to be visiting—did this for me.)  The drain fly situation got better but it is not completely solved, and some sort of exterminator may be next.

So now come the moths.  This past weekend marked the dreaded annual moment when I put away my summer clothes and get out all the winter stuff.  Everything was going fine, and in fact I had found lots of things to give away, which is always a nice, free pick-me-up.  So imagine my surprise when I opened the cedar closet upstairs to retrieve my sweaters and found giant moth holes in about five sweaters.  A few questions about moths:

Why do they only eat cashmere?
Isn’t cedar supposed to keep them away?
Is there a variety of moth that is not deterred by cedar?  If so, that’s the kind I have
Why do moths only eat sweaters that you bought last year, and not the ones that you’ve had for a decade?

And yes, I do have some of those plastic storage bags where you put your sweaters inside and then use a vacuum to suck out the extra air.  And I’m going to use them next winter, I really am.  But...could a squirrel chew through the plastic?

Yesterday I went shopping for fall clothes for work, which is a big event for me because 1) I hate shopping generally, 2) I hate shopping for clothes specifically and 3) everybody knows that you are not supposed to be spending any money any more.  Except on food and, if you absolutely have to, gas, but you’d really be better off walking everywhere.

I have a framed New Yorker cartoon in my office from 2001, the last time we all stopped spending; it is by Marisa Acocella and depicts a woman handing over her credit card at a boutique.  The caption says, “This isn’t for me—it’s for the economy.”  Those words were echoing in my head as I handed over my credit card yesterday...and still this morning I woke up with that sinking feeling that I should not have spent one red cent.  Although I do really like that blue sweater with the interesting detail at the neck and in fact would have worn it to work this morning if it weren’t 75 degrees in New York today, a perplexing reality that must somehow be tied to the meltdown on Wall Street.

But I digress.  I can’t figure out if I feel guilty about spending the money because I always feel a little guilty about spending money, or because every time I turn on the t.v. or look at the paper I get the message that I should have all my money under a mattress

or because I’m genuinely worried that in about six months all my money will be gone and all I’ll have to show for it is a pretty blue sweater.

Can you figure it out?  Are you:

1. spending less because you have to?
2. spending less because you think that’s what life in America calls for right now?
3. spending the way you always have?

--surly drugstore clerks
--a sudden, mysterious hole in the roof
--drain flies
--out of control, opposing-team parents at a kid's soccer game
--people who lie to your face at the office
--mold on the basement wall
--the desire to continue to produce children, even after age 40
--a dead skunk in the pool
--a child whose very good friend is a bad influence
--a cat who gets too old to use his litterbox
--close friends who have completely different political views from your own
--coworkers who think they need to cc you on every email
--waking up at 3 a.m. and not being able to fall asleep again
--children who bicker most of their waking hours
--how to make Sunday dinner after church and two soccer games with a toddler clinging to your leg and a husband who is at ultimate frisbee for the next two hours

--anyone over 35 who has a weird relationship with food
--illnesses that are long and slow and horrible to watch that end in death, not in miraculous recoveries like in a Hollywood movie

--smart, accomplished people who are still insecure
--children who insist at dinner that they finished all their homework who then look at you as you are kissing them goodnight and say, "Don't be mad."

This past weekend Baby got his first haircut and I almost had to take an anti-depressant to get over it.  His hair had gotten really long in the back--so long that it became rat's nesty if he sat in his carseat too long, so long that strangers mistook him for a girl, and so long that my father, who shaves every single day of the year and just has an irrational problem with long hair, was ready to take out some pruning shears and get to work on it himself.

My sister was there and thank God for that because she was obviously a hairdresser in a past life.  Seriously, she can hold hair sideways between her index and middle fingers in that expert way that professional hairdressers do, and she can actually layer.  Anyway, we put Baby in his highchair with a popsicle and I started things off by cutting his bangs way too short.  He looked like the little Dutch boy on the side of the paint can, and I don't mean that as a compliment.  Everyone laughed.  My sister seized the scissors and made everything ok in no time flat, layers included, before Baby had even begun to realize that he was ingesting little pieces of blonde hair with the strawberry popsicle.

Naturally the haircut transformed his entire look--he is no longer a baby but a full-on toddler, with little boyhood just right around the corner.  Before I know it he will be dating a girl I can't stand and then marrying her.  And so I spent the rest of the day both thinking he is the cutest boy in the world and mourning the loss of my true baby with the three little curls on the back of his perfect neck.  I guess that is the thing with parenting:  you watch your child's progress proudly, but your heart is actually sinking.

• Galore
• Nonsense
• Naughty
• Highfalutin
• Gangbusters
• Tad
• Toots

Impossible to answer, right? This is the question that was posed to me last night by Middle.  It was Eat With Your Family Night, and as luck would have it there was no work or soccer or board meetings or ultimate frisbee to interfere with our little family's ability to spend an ideal-sounding-but-actually-fairly-stressful meal together on the little banquette in our kitchen.

Anyway, part of Middle's homework for the night was to fill out a grid with each family member's favorite author, book and genre.  Baby was easy:  Goodnight, Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. Eldest chose Anthony Horowitz  as his favorite author and named a series that I can't frankly remember the name of, but I do remember that one of the books was made into a movie with Ewan MacGregor.  Husband named Herman Melville and Moby Dick, which is part of why I married him, because that would not be my answer in a million years.

I was completely stumped.  When you have been reading great books for decades, how do you pick just one?  My husband actually finally answered for me:  Flannery O'Connor.  But what book?  I lamely said "Complete Stories" to my son and he dutifully wrote it down.  But I did ask him to point out to his teacher that choosing just one book is all but impossible, unless you are 18 months old and that book is Goodnight, Moon.

I've been thinking about books more than usual lately because of our new No-Obligation Book Club on realsimple.com.  If you haven't joined--or if you just need some good book suggestions--check it out. I don't know about you, but it has already expanded my reading list exponentially.