Lisa Scottoline - Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog - The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman

It’s your funeral.

As a result of my valuable childhood preparedness training, I’m the lady stockpiling milk, eggs, bread, rock salt, and snow shovels before a storm. And during the anthrax scare, I was first in line at the hardware store. I bought the requisite cord of Saran Wrap and a gross of duct tape, with which to seal the house, and all of it sits in my basement, at the ready. The deadly cloud of anthrax never came, and for that you have me to thank. I pre-empted it. I scared anthrax. I had enough Saran Wrap to protect all of us, if not keep us fresh for days.

Now that you know how prepared I am, you can imagine my dismay when I read something recently reiterating that all manner of disasters could happen-wildfires, hurricanes, and tornados-and I should go online to test my “readiness quotient” (RQ).

Uh-oh.

I’m terrified to report that even though I unplug my blow dryer after each use and load my knives correctly, my RQ score was a 0 out of 10.

I knew I should have studied.

The report said that the average RQ score for Americans is 4, and that only two other people in my zip code had taken the test. Here’s where I went wrong, so you can learn from my mistakes:

Not only did I not know how to find the emergency broadcast system on my radio, I couldn’t even find my radio.

I don’t have a disaster supply kit, and duct tape doesn’t count.

I don’t have a “Go” kit. I have only a “Stay Home And Wait It Out” kit.

I don’t have a “family communications plan.” Honestly, who does? Communications are hard enough, but family communications are impossible. You have a better chance of surviving a tornado than communicating with your family.

In event of a disaster, I haven’t established a specific meeting place, but that’s easy to choose. The mall.

I don’t drill my family on what to do in an emergency. Scream Hysterically was not an option. Nor was Hurry Back To The Mall.

Nor do I know first aid. Evidently, a box of assorted Band-Aids, even the kind with the antibiotic, isn’t enough. This surprises me. When the earthquake hits, my money’s on Neosporin.

So you know where this is going. I suggest you log on to www.whatsyourrq.org, test yourself, and get your act together before the apocalypse.

See you at the hardware store. I’ll be the one in the gas mask.

In a gas mask, I look young.

Because I lectured you in my commencement speech to slow down and savor the moments of your life, I thought you should know I’m doing nothing like that.

I flunk savoring.

I know it’s the drowsy dog days of summer and I’m supposed to enjoy sitting around watching the tomatoes ripen and noticing the particular hue of the sunlight as it hits the leafy trees and blah blah blah. Summer sounds like literary fiction, but I write books with car chases.

In other words, I got a new summer project.

Let’s see if you can guess what it is. It involves wood, nails, and feathers.

Give up?

A chicken coop.

With chickens.

Here’s how it happened. You know how I am about home decorating, and I just finished with the house, to mixed results. The good news is that the aluminum siding is gone, the stonework looks fantastic, and the clapboard is fresh Bavarian Cream.

The bad news is that the shutters are painted a bright yellow called Candleglow, which is a misnomer. This color is Solar Energy. This color could power a small city. A tactful friend of mine called it “sunny,” but sunny doesn’t come close. If you broke off a piece of the sun itself and stuck it on either side of your windows, you would still only have half of this color. Now you need sunglasses to look at my house, and when you do, you understand instantly why yellow was Vincent Van Gogh’s favorite color.

Because he was crazy.

Look at my shutters and you not only want to cut your ears off, you want to gouge your eyes out. But you couldn’t, because you’d be blinded by the color. Your face might even melt off, too. It’s like Atomic Blast Yellow, and you get the idea. It’s a man-made disaster.

Correction. Woman-made, even better.

I’m trying to live with it, until I get the money to repaint or detonate.

To return to my point, fresh from my success with the house, I saw a picture of a chicken coop. It was adorable, like a doll-house with a little wooden door and two tiny windows, with shutters. It reminded me of the Little Tykes playhouse that daughter Francesca used to have when she was little, or those green plastic houses in Monopoly that you put on Baltic Avenue. I always preferred the houses over the hotels, even though the hotels earned more rent, which gives you an idea of my money management skills.

Anyway when I saw the picture of the coop, I said to myself, I want that little housie, so I guess I have to get some chickens. So now we know which came first, the chicken or the coop.

As it happens, this summer project is fun for everyone in my family, meaning Francesca and me. We went and picked out seven adorable chicks, and we learned new vocabulary words-Brown Sussex, Wyandotte, Araucana, and Australorp, which is a black chicken and not a resident of Australia. They’re all pullets, which means girls, so it took us days to pick their names because we wanted a theme. First we went with Miss Pennsylvania, Miss New Jersey, Miss Delaware, and so on, but they peep like crazy so we tried Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morrisette, Barbra Streisand, and Judy Garland. Then we couldn’t agree on seven girl rock stars, which is clearly what these chicks are, so we decided the dominant one should be Princess Ida and the rest are all other characters from Gilbert & Sullivan, which classes up my house.

We hang with the chicks all the time, watching them grow, singing to them, and trying to get them to love us. The first week they fled from us in fear, flocking at the corner of the cage, but now they’re eating out of our hands, literally. They coo, cluck, and gurgle, and today I’m going out to buy a baby monitor so I can hear them in the house. I’m sure this has nothing to do with Francesca’s graduation from college and undeniable adulthood, but call the police if I try to nurse these chicks.

Ouch.

We obsess on raising and lowering their heat lamp, and we clean their butts, called “vents,” with mineral oil so they don’t “paste up” or, well you guessed it. We also talk about painting the chicken coop pink, since it was an all-girl production, or drawing fake flowers and vines on it, because why not, then considered painting it like a sorority house with Greek letters above the door, or maybe a little theater, since the chicks are all Drama Queens.

So I’m back to paint chips and shutter colors.

I’m thinking Egg Yolk Yellow.

I had originally decided that daughter Francesca and I would skip a vacation this year in favor of a staycation, but that was before I realized how much I hated saying staycation, which isn’t even a word. So I grabbed my VISA card and made a few phone calls, and we were off to a place no Scottoline has ever been.