Ghosts & Cupboards

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Totally empty train cars are eerie.

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Magnolias are in bloom all over the city.

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Little Seawall walker.

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Can’t resist sunlight through the trees.

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All the flat stud rivets I mangled & destroyed while figuring out how to set them. Good thing I bought 100, haha.

The other week Taylor and I got up on Saturday morning and found this super mysterious puddle of water on the kitchen counter. It was under and around the Nespresso so my initial assumption was that Taylor has refilled the machine’s water tank and spilled some on the counter, but he hadn’t refilled it, just turned it on. We worried the Nespresso might be leaking, but the water was clear and had no coffee smell at all. I checked to see if water had gotten trapped under the dish-drying rack and run over to the Nespresso from there but no, the rest of the counter between the sink and the puddle was dry, as was the ceiling. When we opened the cupboard above the Nespresso we found a second puddle. This one was much smaller, at the front of the bottom shelf only. Nothing above it was wet, the shelf-puddle was much smaller than the counter-puddle, and very localized. The very front edge of the shelf had actually become swollen with water, as if it had been sitting there for a very long time, but none of the things on the shelf (sippy cups, coffee caps, sugar bowl) were wet. As far as we could tell, there was no logical explanation for the water. No one had spilled it, it hadn’t leaked from anywhere, and the fact that it appeared to have originated in the otherwise dry upper cabinet and dripped down onto the counter made zero sense. The only possible answer: ghosts. Ghosts did it.*

Gwen discovered this week that if she shuts herself in the bathroom and opens the cupboard under the sink, the cupboard door will prevent the bathroom door from being opened. This caused some serious panic on Monday night when she shut herself in there alone with the bath running, but I managed to bump the cupboard door shut and get in before she climbed into the bath unsupervised. She usually can’t get into the bathroom by herself (there is a gate in the hallway) so we don’t have childlocks on the cupboard but I guess it’s time for that to change.

On Tuesday afternoon I took gwen to the post office with me to mail a couple banners and a pair of boots. I am ALWAYS at the post office, like AT LEAST 2-3 times a week so I’m fairly friendly with a lot of the people who work there. One of the employees, who I chat with regularly, commented on Gwen, saying “She’s always so quiet, I never hear her make a peep!” To which I automatically replied “She doesn’t talk, she has a speech delay.” TALK ABOUT A CONVERSATION DERAILER. And it’s also not strictly true: Gwen does talk, just not as much as she should. tbh she hasn’t made any huge strides since January; she has a couple new words but not many**. She has, however, reached the point where not being able to effectively communicate has become so frustrating for her that she just SCREAMS and SCREAMS. She also screams to express happiness & joy, so in spite of her delayed talking she is DEFINITELY not “always so quiet.”

* It’s possible that one of us sleepwalked to the kitchen and put an ice cube in the cupboard which melted slowly overnight, but idk how much more likely that is that ghosts. Not very, tbh.

** Huh, just as I was writing this post the speech pathologist we saw in January called to see how Gwen was doing and schedule an appointment for early April. Serendipity!

2 Replies to “Ghosts & Cupboards”

  1. When I was a kid, I took the bathroom key and locked myself inside… and then threw the key in the bathtub into which I couldn’t get into, because I was too small.

    So… My dad ended up making a hole at the bottom of the door that my brought could squeeze through so he got inside and ~rescued~ me. Later, my mom made little curtains for it and our cats used it, because they had their litter in there.

    1. One of my younger siblings locked themselves in our bathroom once, but luckily the house wasn’t finished yet and there was a weird hole in the wall by the bathtub that led to the laundry room and my older sister was able to squeeze through it on a rescue mission.

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