Happy Birthday To Middle!

It is Middle's birthday today, an event that is important enough not only to get me to leave work early, but also to get me to write on my hand that I am going to leave work early, so I can't forget. And it's important enought that I want to celebrate that by, for a change, thinking about someone besides me.

I am aware that in the very sentence where I announced I was going to think about someone else, I used "I" and "me" each once, and someone else's name once. I'm also aware that just a few sentences into this entry, the balance is tilted very heavily to being about me and very heavily against being about Middle.

I have a lot of fun poking fun at Middle and the rest of the kids here, but I very rarely mention all the good things they do. They do good things, you know, things that aren't as funny as not eating bratwurst patties even though you like bratwursts because bratwurst patties are round and that affects how they taste. Good things like Middle recently talking me into buying the four-light light fixture for the kitchen, and the clear-dome at that, instead of the three-light fixture with blue domes. Middle said the four-light fixture was nicer and would be brighter and she turned out to be right, because I installed the new light fixture in the kitchen this Sunday and our kitchen is now bright enough to see even though we still have the other light fixture that doesn't work, and even though I learned yet again that there is no fuse to switch off that particular light fixture.

I thought I had it this time, too: After installing the new fixture on one side of the kitchen, I went to try to fix the other, broken light fixture. To make sure that I could tell when the fuse was turned off, I used three failsafe items: the stove, the coffee maker, and a hair dryer plugged into the wall below the light fixture. See, last time I used only the coffee maker, and instructed The Boy to tell me when the coffee maker light went off while I went and flipped circuit breakers. The coffee maker light turns off on its own, though, sometimes, so when I began working on the wires last time, I almost got electrocuted and concluded that I hadn't flipped the right circuit breaker and it had just been coincidence that the coffee maker turned off on its own at that moment.

This time, I outsmarted the creative wiring, and used the stove, and a hair dryer which I plugged in and turned on. Then I had Middle stand there and tell me when the hair dryer went off, and when it did, I began working on the wiring, only to get shocked again.

I'm lucky, I guess, that the wiring in our house is so old that it doesn't actually carry much electricity through it, because twice now I've been standing on a metal ladder when I grabbed a live wire and felt electricity shoot into me.

Our wiring looks a little worse than this.

I don't know how the wire can carry enough electricity to shock me but not enough to generate light in the fixture it's hooked up to. I try not to think about that.

I ended up, that day, flipping the main circuit breaker and shutting down all power to our house, a move that resulted in, I should add, resetting my coffee maker timer so now it doesn't make the coffee automatically at six a.m. I haven't reset it yet because I've been busy.

Hey, how's that post about someone else going for you?

Back to Middle. Middle is turning 17 today, and was right about the light fixture and it was not her fault that I was almost electrocuted. Those are two very good things about her. There are lots more, and I don't have the time or the space to list them all, so I'll give you the highlights, in no particular order:

Middle once compared me favorably to Brett Favre. If she'd never done anything else good in her life, that alone would have gotten her in my good graces forever -- but she's done a lot of other great stuff, too.

Middle loves animals and her brothers and sisters and goes out of her way for all of them and almost never complains, even when Oldest makes her watch reruns of "Laguna Beach" all Sunday afternoon, and even when Mr F and Mr Bunches invade her room while naked and try to grab her pictures.

Middle's Cat: Scruffy Jean McDougal! And yes, she's winking!

Almost the first thing Middle does everyday is clean out the litterboxes. With three cats, that's a chore, and she does it before breakfast. I don't like to do it at all, and I would never do it before my cereal.

Middle also works at her job at Old Navy and volunteers at a horse farm and spent one day pitching hay for hours, for no pay, because she likes animals and wants to be a vet and working on the farm will help her get into vet school. She argues that she was not "pitching" hay because she didn't have a pitchfork, but conceded that "throwing" and "pitching" are synonyms.

Middle always gets the right size milk glass for me when she sets the table.

Middle gets really really good grades almost all of the time and tries her hardest all of the time.

So if you read this, leave a comment wishing Middle a happy birthday, and in the future, bring your cats and dogs and turtles and cows and older sisters and younger brothers to her. She'll make sure they're taken care of, whether they need to choose the right fixture, eat some hay, or watch MTV all afternoon.