HOW TO PUT A BLENDER TOGETHER CORRECTLY AND OTHER MYSTERIES OF LIFE

You can be stumbling along happily in life, tripping over occasional bouts of sheer joy and falling into gaping holes of wonder (don’t those verbs just sound wrong used that way?). And suddenly you wander into a bright fluorescent-lit room with extremely unflattering large mirrors and staring back at you is a rather worn-looking 50ish woman on the incorrect side of chunky. Wearing rather ill-fitting clothing (granted, it was 20 degrees, and I was wearing about four layers of clothing), very very short hair with only about half of it spiked, and the rest just sticking out at odd angles. Complexion that suddenly appears rough, splotchy and uneven.

Add to this having NO place open to eat other than Denny’s (over an hour wait just for a table) and Carl’s Jr. One advantage of being related to a fast-food restaurant employee is that they can get behind locked doors, which my daughter did . . . and was directly assayed by management to put on a uniform and get to work.

So coming home this afternoon, having ingested two fast-food hamburgers and two highly- caffeinated drinks in the part 18 hours and having spent over an hour at the hospital watching a child of mine fight through a drunken stupor of a little bit too much anesthesia given during the procedure of a gastric look-and-see (I could not in my wildest dreams repeat the actual medical term for snaking a camera down a throat into the stomach and taking photos of the lining, in this case shooting a wonderful color image of an ulcer, most likely caused by handfuls of ibuprofen ingested daily)(if I only had a scanner, I would post it for you)(now what was I talking about), I arrived home desperate for a nap (I normally sleep in a snore-free zone, and last night was denied both my white-noise fan background noise and company of my furry, snore-free canine companion).

But since I had drunken several malicious Diet Cokes (actually, just one Diet Coke - the other one was a Dr. Pepper . . . which is worse), I only laid quietly for a few minutes before my cat, denied my presence for, what, eighteen hours, jumped up on the bed and demanded close, physical contact with his chin and ears for about a half hour. I gave up eventually, kept myself awake vacuuming, taking out the trash that wasn’t taken out last night (read that STINKY remains from someone’s dinner), cleaning up the remains of someone’s dinner BEFORE it ended up in the trash, then awarded myself by (supposedly) the rest of the evening playing spider solitaire.

However, when that rest of the residents of my house stomped in about fourteen seconds after I had begun my first game, I made the fatal mistake of opening proclaiming, "I HAVE HAD A VERY ROUGH DAY AND I AM NOT IN A GOOD MOOD PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE."

Somewhere a long, long time ago I was taught that if you were direct and honest, you would get what you wanted. HA! This particular chunk of scrupulousness (another just cool word - it looks like either a very rare disfiguring disease or a medieval term issued to knights on horseback) caused an immediate disappearance of one individual and an extremely defensive stance from the other one. Within minutes, I was accused of being offensive (for using disinfection wipes on a common object - I just don’t want to catch someone else’s cold - and I wasn’t blatant about it, really), and was tiptoed around for the rest of the evening.

So now everyone has gone to bed, my dog is asleep at my feet, the dishwasher is loaded, and I have promised myself an extremely long, very hot bath, and then at least one disc of The Office while I eat the last bit of ice cream there is in the freezer.