She means well.

You may have noticed I've been gone for a little bit.

I haven't been anywhere. I've been wrangling Sister Nicholas. That's a Hollywood term. If there are dogs or animals on a movie set, there is a person called an "animal wrangler". I met such a person once. At the time, he was wrangling a pony and a tiger while on the job. He said something about a rhinoceros in his future, but I had drifted away, worrying about the pony.



Sister Nicholas is an enormous help, don't get me wrong. She does things around here that we never even think to do. For example, that white strip of plastic that is on the bottom of the outside of the refrigerator where air flows in...did you know that pops right off? Who knew? We now have things that are clean that I didn't even know existed, like that white piece of plastic.


The whole bottom of a dryer comes off, too, so you can clean around the lint trap. This is a very handy thing to know about because other things end up there. We found a whole pot holder and twenty six dollars, a guitar pick, bobby pins and the neighbor's cat.

No, we didn't find a cat. We found the pony, in there hiding from that tiger.


No, we didn't. But we did find the twenty six dollars, the pot holder, the guitar pick and the bobby pins. No one here even has a guitar. Everyone is afraid to try to play one after hearing the true story of what happened to the Singing Nun. She met a bad end. Poor thing.

Unfortunately, Sister Nicholas decided she could also take the computer apart to clean it. Which is where I've 'been'. We had to wait for the eight grade boys to get home from soccer camp to get us up and running again. They have a word for Sister Nicholas: Old School.

I was trying to explain to them that Sister Nicholas does things that people used to do that no one does anymore: get down on her hands and needs with a scrub brush and scrub the front step, add vinegar to potatoes when they boil so they don't 'turn dark', wax the floor.

Does anyone wax their floors anymore? If they do, can they please explain to me how they stay on their feet without going bottom over teakettle when the phone rings on the other side of the house? P.G. Wodehouse described what happened to me when the phone rang by saying, "the air was full of arms and legs."

The kitten, who loves cleaning and sweeping, is in kitten heaven. He will be so bored with us when her time here is up.

During all of this, I feel compelled to hand her things, find things (like vinegar), give her a hand with things, or stop her from doing things. One can't idly by while someone right there is slaving away, hence the wrangling. I don't know how she got away from me long enough to blow up the computer.

But we did use a little of the twenty six dollars to make a fabulous peace pie.

If you add lemon juice to the peaches, they won't turn brown.