Humorless people suck

Meelyn's graduation party is coming up this Sunday, which means that it's just about time to buy all the food we're planning to serve. Lots of it can be put together this coming week, but the bulk of it will be done on Saturday. Which means that the Big Shopping Trip will happen on Friday.

Mee and I decided that the bulk of what we're buying should be purchased at the local Gordon Food Service, which is a store, like Staples, in which I could wander for hours and hours, lost to demanding clocks, text message notifications and pesky store managers who eventually want to GO HOME for the evening. Today, then, was a banner day for me because it was the day I got to go to GFS and use their Menu Wizard for the first time.

The Menu Wizard is a nifty system which involves a store employee giving you a barcode scanner, much like the one you see in the picture above. You go through the store, clicking the little trigger at the barcodes of the items you which to purchase; when you're finished, all your info is magically uploaded into one of the computers at Customer Service, and when you're done clicking, you and an employee stand there and allow the computer to reckon up, say, how much potato salad you're going to need.

As you can image, the highlight of this entire experience was getting to use that scanner gun. I was restrained enough not to point it at fellow shoppers and squeak "Pitchooo! Pitchooo!" at them, which is what I am absolutely certain Susan or Allison would have done. (Carol and Meelyn would have encouraged them to do it, and then gone to hide behind a huge display of barbecue sauce and laugh.) My restraint failed me when the store manager first handed the gizmo to me and said, "This is the Menu Wizard."

I took it from her and said with great seriousness, "Oh, gee. I'm kind of disappointed. I thought the Menu Wizard would be a person wearing a robe and a pointy hat."

She gave me a long look. "A person? In a robe? And....a pointy hat?"

"Uhm, yeah. Because, you know. Wizard." I shifted back and forth from foot to foot while she stood there, clearly waiting for me to come to some kind of point. "A wizard? Like Harry Potter? Dumbledore? Hermione? He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Called-Voldemort?"

"Oh. Well. I'm not a fan," she said crushingly. She proffered the scanner and I took it from her meekly and went off, feeling severely snubbed. I snuck a look over my shoulder and she was looking after me with a frowny face, like she thought I was going to take a wand from my purse (nine inches, pecan wood, rather whippy) and start making the packages of paper plates dance the Macarena.

So, okay. Maybe that wasn't the funniest thing I've ever said. But honestly, don't you think it's kind of worth a smile, thinking about a guy with a beard and a robe and a pointy hat sitting back in the break room, smoking a pipe and reading The Daily Prophet, just waiting for customers to come in so that he could work his magic with the sliced Virginia ham and the colby-jack cheese?

No?

Shut up.

Suddenly this summer....

So I haven't written a single word on my blog since January 17, I've been told. One part of me feels like a complete slacker, because writing is supposed to be what I do, you dig? On the other hand, even my own mother doesn't read my blog, so for all she knows, I could have contracted some terrible disfiguring disease that caused all my fingers to fall off so that all my typing had to be done with my nose, which is why it has taken me SEVENTY-FIVE HOURS TO TYPE THE LAST THREE SENTENCES.

No, seriously. I don't have a disease that made my fingers fall off. And, surprisingly enough, I haven't been avoiding my blog out of laziness, a character flaw that I heartily endorse in myself, but completely deplore in other people, especially people who are supposed to be bringing me a Diet Coke. Actually, I've been doing stuff. Mostly stuff like teaching some classes, not exactly what one could call full-time, but somewhat more than part time. Plus, Meelyn and Aisling both have jobs and schoolwork to keep them busy -- the two of them used to work at the same Hardee's, but in the past few months they've moved on, Mee to Ruby Tuesday and Aisling to Fazoli's (she comes home smelling delightfully of garlic butter) -- and both have been swamped with schoolwork, as is the norm at Our Lady of Good Counsel. I don't think it was Our Lady who advised, "Keep the little jerks busy and they'll stay out of trouble," but it's a good motto anyway, don't you think?

Also in the news, my husband is still selling cars and he's also gone back to lifting weights, alternating that with his running so that he's looking way too cute for someone his age and the other day we were at a restaurant and a young server asked him, "Do you ever sell tickets to your gun show?" and I gave her a slitty-eyed look and said in a voice laced with cheerful menace, "That is MY gun show, sweetie, and those tickets sold out a loooong time ago." At any rate, he's looking so ripped, I've had to do my part so that he wouldn't be the only pretty thing in our marriage and now...I am, well -- and those of you who know me had better sit down -- I've been exercising. Yes. Swimming, actually. I love to swim, mostly because it allows me the solitude I need in which to be surly about exercising. If you walk on a treadmill, other people come in to the cardio room at the YMCA and they want to say hello to you when they get there and goodbye to you when they leave and I just can't stand it. When I go into the cardio room at the Y, my first thought is that I want the person who is already on my favorite treadmill -- the one in front of the big fan -- to die, and also the two people to the left and right so that I won't have to smile at anyone. The pool allows me the freedom to be who I am, and that is a big stinker.

And yet there's more: Meelyn has been accepted to my alma mater, Ball State University, where she plans to study dietetics and exercise science (I don't know where I went wrong with that girl), and she also has a serious boyfriend, Bobby, who is just the nicest guy ever. They are so cute together that sometimes I have to go outside and quietly vomit into the shrubs, but most of the time, they make my husband and me remember what it was like when we were as shiny and new as they are, and that makes us do stuff like go out walking in the rain, holding hands. Plus, isn't it always the most awesome thing ever to find out that there are other people in the world to love and be loved by? I hold such a dim view of humanity that's it always comes as something of a shock, the most pleasant of surprises, to stumble across another person who is just...good.

So here we are and it is summer vacation, and although I have a ton of prep work to do for the classes I'm teaching next school year -- Shakespeare, American literature, college prep composition, a composition class for middle schoolers and a Shakespeare for Grownups class -- I also plan to just do some sitting and some reading and some catching up here so that when, every now and then, someone asks me "So why aren't you writing on your blog anymore?" I can answer, "But I am!"

Pass the Puffs

Once a winter, I get that kind of cold where I lose my voice. Not a total loss; just enough to make me speak in something between a breathy murmur (which bears no resemblance to the smoky purr of Marilyn Monroe when she sang the happy birthday song to John F. Kennedy) and a strangled squeak. My throat hurts when I talk, but that doesn't stop me because when you're a mother, when does something like a lousy cold stop you from doing ANYTHING, up to and including giving birth, hauling yourself out of the house to drive various children to various activities and baking a pan of hopefully un-coughed-upon brownies for the church chili supper.

Naturally, this is one of my family's favorite times of the year, the time when they can, in all truthfulness, say that they didn't hear me calling them twenty-five times for dinner. Or telling them to take the dogs out. Or telling them to...oh, never mind. They just love it, that's all. And they never cease talking about how delighted they are that I've been reduced to a series of eye rolls, scowls, gestures and emphatic huffing sighs. It reminds me of the Buffy episode titled "Hush," where the entire town of Sunnydale lost their voices due to the influence of the super-scary Gentlemen, and Giles was forced to communicate with the Scoobies with plastic overlays on an overhead projector.

So, like all mothers everywhere who will catch a bad cold or the flu this winter, I'm still patrolling, just like you. We're all still patrolling. I'm just thankful that I don't have to stake anything more resistant than the baking potatoes I'm getting ready to put into the oven.

Forecast: snow and wind, then more snow. With wind.

I don't know who made this "AccuWeather" map, but whoever it was is my personal hero. Not only for being funny, but also for making sure my area of the country is designated as part of the group that needs to hit the liquor store. Because I found out last year when the snow lay on the ground like a big fleece blanket with a deceptive three inch layer of ice underneath, you can get through the winter without the whiskey to make a hot toddy, but why would you want to?

Maid service(Or how to make money in your spare time without ever leaving your home)

Let's say I have this....friend.

My...friend....has several friends who employ people to come in and clean their homes: these people are called "cleaners." People who clean the house but also answer the telephone and the front door are "maids." People who live in residence and supervise the cleaning are "housekeepers." In this economy, the job my....friend... inadvertently fell into, much like Alice fell down that rabbit hole, was a job as a maid.

The house she currently works in, she already answered the phone and the front door bell, as well as letting the dogs in and out all day long. She also does almost all the laundry, cooks all the food, and loads and unloads the dishwasher about a hundred times a day, it seems. All in all, it keeps me her pretty busy, considering that she also has several part-time jobs, a husband and two teenage daughters.

This is how she came to be a maid, and how you may also find yourself with a calling to do as she has done.

This friend....she couldn't help but notice however much she ordered, begged, wheedled, cajoled, demanded, implored or nagged, those two teenage daughters - and lovely young ladies they are - were still inclined to leave their dirty unmentionables strung across the bathroom floor, abandon cruddy plates adorned with a half-eaten turkey sandwich and a banana peel on any available kitchen counter when the sink, and moreover, THE DISHWASHER, were sitting right there in plain view, not to mention various high-heeled shoes, schoolbooks, hoodies, volleyballs, earrings, iPods and other miscellaneous STUFF lying around everywhere until my friend was nearly distracted with the yuck of it all.

One time, she says that she left a coupon for 40-percent-off-your-purchase-of-50-dollars-or-more from Ulta Beauty on her dining room floor for three days, just to see when one of the girls would pick it up. Even though they daintily stepped over it day after day on their way from the living room to the kitchen and back again, neither girl so much as stooped over to lift the rectangular piece of paper from the floor, even though this coupon was much coveted by both daughters, who had planned to each spend $25 at Ulta and garner that whopping forty percent discount. Finally, on that third day, my friend cracked. She leaned over, picked up that coupon with trembling fingers, and took it to the kitchen wastebasket, where she defiantly tore it into tiny shreds and then flipped the switch to MASH IT MASH IT MASH IT with the rest of the trash.

She swears that not five minutes later, both girls were on her like weasels in a hen coop, demanding to know where their precious Ulta Beauty coupon was. She pressed her fingertips to her forehead, prayed a silent Hail Mary to the Blessed Mother with the plea that heaven's angels would hold her back from killing these two gifts from God standing before her with their accusatory stares and screechy voices and said, "Ladies, the coupon is gone. Yes, that's right. GONE. And do you know why? Because it laid there on the dining room floor, right where the two of you walk a hundred times every day, a bright pink and green coupon on our pale taupe carpet, and IF IT WAS THAT FRIGGING PRECIOUS, ONE OF YOU SHOULD HAVE BENT DOWN AND PICKED IT UP!"

Both girls sniffed disdainfully. "I always have to pick EVERYTHING up, " said the older girl, whose propensity for leaving a clump of soggy hair in the shower drain after each shampoo was driving her poor mother to the chardonnay as early as 5:05 p.m.

"You do not!" the younger one countered furiously. "I always have to pick everything up, EVERYTHING!" In spite of the fact that one of those "magic" bottles for feeding orange juice to baby dolls had been lying on the floor of her closet since she was seven.

My friend, that poor woman, shouldered past the two of them and went upstairs to her bedroom, where she sank into the comfy chair, that chair in which she used to nurse her sweet babies before they were ambulatory and able to scatter bright plastic pieces of Fisher-Price throughout the entire house. "Back then, it was easy," she muttered. "And then when they learned to walk, we made cleanup a game. They'd bring me the little toys and put them in the pretty willow laundry basket and we'd clap after they threw each thing in....But now, here they are, old enough to DRIVE, one of them old enough to VOTE, both of them nearly out of high school, and it's like they think their hands can no longer be used to pinch and grasp and their spines no longer curve to pick up coupons or dirty laundry or HAIR from the DRAIN.

"I feel like the maid around here, because both those stinkers know I can't stand a mess and if they leave something long enough, I'll just do it for them. But I am NOT the maid, I am the MOTHER, goshdarnit! I'd be getting PAID if I were a MAID, but I'm NOT, so...."

And then a little light bulb went on over my friend's rumpled head.

She could get paid for the little cleaning services she provided, doing it just the way a maid would: quietly, efficiently and steadily. No more shouting, no more nagging, just diligently getting the job done and then presenting her employers with a bill for services rendered. In this case, she thought, a dollar per service would be plenty. Both girls had the ability to hold onto their money more tightly than Lady Gaga holds onto a microphone, so even a meager little dollar would give them both a kick in the pants that would hopefully wake them up to the fact that piggish and slatternly behavior is rude and selfish in the family home, but even worse in adult life, when living, say, in a dorm. Or in a bachelor girl apartment with a roommate. Or with a brand new husband, who might be dismayed to find that his beautiful bride, with her sparkling eyes and sunshiny smile actually had the home management skills of a crack whore.

So that's how I've she's made a nice little sum of money over the past few weeks, and frankly, it looks like she's found a cash cow, because both girls just keep on leaving empty milk cartons in the fridge and pencil sharpener shavings spilled on the desk and coats draped over the newel post on the staircase. Both of them are naturally indignant at being charged for their familial misdemeanors, but my friend is adamant: either pick it up yourselves, darlings, or pay to have it picked up for you.

The house is tidy and my friend has been able to cut back on the chardonnay, and if her girls keep it up for a few more weeks, she may have enough money saved up to buy those really cute boots she saw at Macy's.

Ununderstable

Today I was standing in front of the stove, grilling a hot ham and cheese sandwich for Aisling, when the smoke detector took umbrage with my method of sandwich-making and began to shriek in loud, long paroxysms of rage that made me want to grab the broom and knock it off the ceiling so I could stamp it to death.

Would you like to know why the smoke detector moved me to such extremes? It's because last Thursday, my British Literature class came over for an evening of pizza and David Copperfield, and my husband went out to Pizza Hut and fetched the pizzas, putting them in the oven upon his return because I wasn't quite finished babbling about characters and point of view and genres and - one of my favorite topics - the Timeline of British Literature. As I was nattering on and on, talking about bildungsroman and child labor and how Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, died of typhus, I started to smell something burning.

But, you know, the smoke detector wasn't going off. It was completely silent. Knowing how it gets that urge to scream its head off if a biscuit so much as turns golden-brown, I decided that I was imagining things and kept on talking.

A moment later, my eyes felt all itchy and watery, and the burny smell was stronger. "Excuse me," I said to my students, "but I think my kitchen is on fire."

I went through the swing door from the dining room and went into the kitchen, which was full of smoke. Smoke, I'd like to add, that was going completely undetected by the SMOKE DETECTOR on the ceiling.

Nervously, I yanked open the oven door and pulled out the pizza box on the lower rack which was, yes indeedy, BURNING on the bottom. I made haste with a dish towel and stifled it before it actually burst into flames, but it was darned scary. Which why I am holding a bitter grudge against the stupid smoke alarm, squealing up there above my head today over a grilled sandwich that wasn't even burning.

Which is also why, if the Machine Apocalypse that takes place in the Terminator movie franchise ever happens, I am going to be the sharpshooter in charge of going around and shooting all the smoke detectors.

Reversing the Bucket

No, it isn't what you might be thinking and has nothing to do with the stomach flu my family was passing around two weeks ago. At Christmas, which is the BEST TIME EVER to be puking sick. But I digress.

I was scouting around the internets yesterday, catching up on reading at some of my favorite news sites and blogs, and it seems that the latest craze to hit the blogging world - now that the nosy, intrusive and self-indulgent meme seems to finally be over, thanks all the holy saints and angels - is the reverse bucket list, the ten things you NEVER want to do before you die.

Some of the things I read were pretty darned funny. Others weren't so much funny as they were relatable, making me shiver in sympathetic horror. "Live alone in a huge mansion with only my life-sized Victorian doll collection to comfort me," was an item on one person's list, and I can spot a person who read Stephen King's The Tommyknockers twenty-five years ago and never, ever, ever forgot about that room full of dolls: I can spot that person from a thousand yards.

The only stipulation is that the list has to include things you could actually do.

So here's my Reverse Bucket List. Do you have one you'd like to share?

Things I Never Want to Do Before I Die

1. Remove 1970s groovy gold flocked wall paper from a room with ten foot ceilings. Again.

2. Stick my hand into the back of a baby's diaper while thinking, "I wonder if she pooped?" (I found out later that it's much easier to determine this status if you just hold the baby's diapered butt in front of your face and take a deep sniff.)

3. Be on Survivor. Because being hot and being hungry are never a good combination with me, plus I'd have to participate in all of those gym-class-from-hell challenges. It's not for me to be the plucky middle-aged mother figure who bosses everyone around and gets voted out either first or second and no one can even remember her ever being there after episode three.

4. Go to a Mass where all the music is the guitar-strummed kind and where we all stand around the altar holding hands during the consecration. And where there's a liturgical dancer. My experiences with being on the viewing end of liturgical dances? Negative, every last one of them.

5. Be a liturgical dancer. Even though I do fit the demographic, which is middle-aged, lumpy, and not necessarily a great genius in the art of dance.

6. And continuing on with the performing arts thing, EVER EVER AGAIN play the piano for a friend's event, no matter how wheedling her voice, how hopeful her puppy eyes. See Item #4 from this post if you'd like to know why.

7. Eat another raw oyster. Grandad once told me, when I was about ten, that he'd give me five dollars if I'd eat a raw oyster. He spoke to me of the horseradishy deliciousness of cocktail sauce, and how oysters were just fishy enough to lend a piquant air of the seaside to the sauce. He pointed out quite reasonably that he himself was eating an appetizer of a dozen oysters on the half shell, which he considered to be a particularly delightful treat. He would, he pressed, be happy to share one with me.

I should have known that there was something behind all this urgency because he was a prankster, a ruthless cutthroat gin rummy player and a twister of fairy tales, where the witch ended up eating Hansel and signing Gretel on as her apprentice. Anyway, I put the oyster in my mouth, which was not piquant at all, but tasted more like something that had washed up on the shore at high tide last week; it immediately grew to the size of a wadded up gym sock in my mouth, and UGH, so slimy. Grandad was laughing so hard, he couldn't even make noise. I promptly went to the ladies' room and threw up, which made me throw up more, because regurgitated oyster? Looks even worse than it did before, which was pretty bad.

Grandad apologized, tried to reassure me that his motives had been as pure as the water off the beaches in Bermuda, and gave me twenty dollars. I allowed myself to be only slightly mollified.

8. Learn to like football. It would make the previous forty-something years of my life, years I have spent telling people, "Look. SHUT UP," whenever they've tried to explain the game of football to me, such a waste of time. I plan to carry on being massively bored by football - and baseball, basketball, hockey and every other sport you care to name - for the remainder of my life.

9. Become a member of a certain political party, which I won't name because I don't want to hurt any reader's feelings or tick anyone off, but my mind just doesn't work that way and I wouldn't want it to if it could.

10. Go to the Indiana State Fair and leave without visiting the horses, the goats, the pigs, the cows and most of all, the zonkey. I don't care how stinky everyone thinks the animal barns are. I don't care if the whole family heads back home without me. I don't even care, much, if I step in something icky. I don't feel like I've had the whole State Fair experience unless I've gone to see the animals and petted the zonkey and remarked on how big the hooves on the draft horses are and how fat the pigs. Some people go for the food, some people go for the midway, but I like the farm animals and I'm tired of having to apologize for that. So YEE-HAW! Wilbur, here I come!

RECIPE: Crustless Quiche Muffins

This recipe for crustless quiche muffins is one I've been working on for several months, ever since the girls and I fell in love with the ones from Paradise Cafe and Bakery. What we didn't fall in love with was the enormous calorie and fat count, because the quiche muffins from Paradise, while completely cheesy and delicious, are practically the nutritional equivalent of a 6-ounce prime rib. I thought it would be nice to have a quiche muffin for breakfast that was full of protein, low in calories and fat and reasonably portable for busy mornings; also one that didn't require me to skip lunch because I'd already consumed a jillion calories.

These muffins are a good size and they're nice and dense. Eat one with a banana or an orange or even a container of yogurt and you've got a nice, sustaining breakfast that will stick with you. Or, heck, these things are so light in terms of calories and fat, you could have one for a quick snack in the afternoon when you need a jolt of energy-revving protein to carry you through the remainder of the work day and on into that dinner prep-homework-bath-and-bed-time routine.

In spite of the long ingredient list, these muffins mix up in a big hurry: It's mostly just a matter of opening packages and dumping ingredients into a mixing bowl.

CRUSTLESS QUICHE MUFFINS

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups Egg Beaters refrigerated egg
2 whole eggs, beaten
1 cup skim milk
2 cups Bisquick Heart-Smart baking mix (or the regular kind, if you'd prefer)
1 7-oz package reduced-fat sharp cheddar cheese
1 cup reduced-fat grated parmesan cheese (or, again, the regular kind, your pref)
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
1 16-oz package frozen spinach
2 teaspoons salt, or to taste (you can always use less in the recipe and add more to each portion)
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes, optional

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Thaw spinach by emptying bag into a colander and running lukewarm water over it until soaked; allow to drain while you put everything else together. In a medium mixing bowl, combine all other ingredients and stir. Squeeze out the drained spinach in the colander, pressing it to remove as much water as possible (I always use the edge of a plastic measuring cup.) Add the spinach to the egg mixture, stirring to make sure all the spinach gets un-clumped.

Take two regular muffin pans and spray them thoroughly with non-stick spray. Then spray them again. And again. Why, you ask? Because I learned from painful experience that if you don't make those muffin cups as non-stick-able as possible, you will be prying your little crustless quiches out with a chisel, leaving half of them adhering firmly to your pan.

Fill the muffin cups all the way full - they will pouf up a bit into the traditional domed muffin shape - and you will get a yield of about 21 muffins. If you fill them slightly less full, your muffins will be appreciably smaller, but you can get a full two dozen out of your quiche mixture. Really, it's whatever you prefer.

Bake muffins for 35-40 minutes, until set and a toothpick inserted in a center muffin comes out clean. Allow muffins to cool completely before removing from pan. You may need to gently go around each one with a knife to loosen them. Store in the fridge (we put ours in gallon-sized plastic bags) and reheat by microwaving for about a minute per muffin. Delicious!

Nutritional Information:
Servings: 21 muffins as prepared with lower calorie/fat ingredients
Total Calories: 136.7; Total Fat: 5.5g (Saturated: 1.3g; Polyunsatured: 0.3g; Monounsaturated: 0.6); Cholesterol: 36.1mg; Sodium: 623.6mg; Potassium: 145.5mg; Total Carbohydrates: 13.9g (Dietary Fiber: 0.5g; Sugars: 1.6g); Protein: 8.7g
Weight Watchers Points Plus: 3 per muffin

On the first day of Christmas, or Why I Have Neglected My Blog for a Month

December is a busy month and a difficult time for blogging, what with all the other insane holiday crap women are called upon to do, so the next time you're wondering if the glass ceiling has been well and truly broken, look around and ask yourself: Who bought the gifts? Who wrapped them? Who planned the menu, did the shopping and cooked enough food to feed an army? Who cleaned (I noted that my last post here was the one outlining instructions on how to spiff up the house in case of an unexpected guest emergency)? Oh, I'm not saying that my husband did nothing. He's actually a great help and sexily muscled in our nine-and-a-half-foot Christmas tree into the house on his shoulder, which, if it were left to me, would have still been lashed to the top of the van. I think the problem is that, when it comes to household organization, particularly holiday household organization, the women are the quarterbacks and the men are special teams.

So you know what I did in the few weeks leading up to Christmas, and I know what you did because we were all doing the same thing, right?

But you don't know what I was doing on the actual Twenty-Fifth of December, and BOY IS IT WORTH THE TELLING.

Here's a rundown, and I hope as you read it, you will see absolutely nothing in it similar to your own merry holiday.

1. Christmas Eve - presents were all wrapped, except for the $#@% stocking presents, which I always forget to wrap until about 1:30 a.m. The house was pristine, all items for Christmas dinner were set out and ready for cooking, all systems go. Mass was at 6:30 p.m. and I even remembered to set out the Baby Jesus in both nativities.

2. Christmas Morning - Up and opening gifts at 7:00; on the road to New Castle to open gifts at Mom and Dad's at 9:15. Arrival at 10:00, Mom had brunch underway, family sat down to open presents. Merriment ensued.

3. Mom put breakfast out on the beautifully-laid dining room table. Poppy said a prayer and everyone tucked in. Two minutes later, my husband said, "I don't feel well. I think I'll go lie down."

4. Everything went to hell from there. Let me take you through the next 24 hours with my husband:

barfing feverishness saltine crackers tea with honey more puking headache and....other unmentionable agony, bathroom-related, more barfing, puking, heaving, hurling and heaving

5. On Monday morning, the poor guy was better and able to sit upright, albeit remaining as white as salt, occasionally overtaken by violent shivering.

6. On Monday afternoon, I was coming down the stairs with a basket of laundry and got to the landing, stepped down too many steps, and ended up hurtling down to the foyer floor, landing in a crumpled heap and surrounded by dirty socks and underwear.

7. It hurt.

8. A lot.

9. I ached all over until very, very early on Wednesday morning, when I awoke from an uneasy slumber -- nothing like that "long winter's nap" spoken about so blithely in Clement Moore's poem -- with the certain conviction that I was getting ready to experience

barfing feverishness saltine crackers tea with honey more puking headache and....other unmentionable agony, bathroom-related, more barfing, puking, heaving, hurling and heaving

10. Which I did, worse than my husband, and up until New Year's Eve, spent my days sitting in grey-faced languor on the couch, nursing my bruised ankle, shoulder, knee and hip and occasionally twitching.

11. Meelyn and Aisling managed to avoid the horrible stomach virus, but caught a bad cold that required gallons of orange juice, Ny-Quil and hot tea to treat.

11. On New Year's Eve, the four of us went to the Outback so that we could at least say we'd done something fun. We had a good time, but were back home by 9:00, changed into our pajamas and sat back down on the couch, me still twitching and both girls coughing, sneezing and blowing their noses. My husband said that he was still feeling kind of rocky, six days after the onset of the stomach virus.

12. I concurred.

13. We went to bed rather early, bemoaning the fact that, while our entire year has been really amazing and positive, the last week of it was so awful, we all wanted to salute it with a great, big, wet raspberry and yell "GOOD RIDDANCE!" out the front door.

So! That's what I've been doing for the last month and the last week of that month.

As I said before, I hope you experienced nothing like it.

Keep it to yourself, sonny boy

My office-away-from-home is the Paradise Bakery and Cafe at Hamilton Town Center on the Noblesville/Fishers border. I can be found there several days a week, hopefully at that one four-top table with the handy plug in for my laptop, surrounded by various sorts of Shakespeare stuff -- currently Othello, Much Ado About Nothing and King Lear, but also a with a copy of Beowulf and another of The Canterbury Tales and sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't have been easier, when all was said and done, to have become a fortune-teller or a traveling hobo, both of which are occupations that strike me as being less likely to drown one in a sudden avalanche of books -- and lapping up a cup of coffee. So I'm sort of a regular and I see the same people there all the time, which isn't that surprising when it comes to the counter staff, but maybe a bit more so when it comes to the clientele, who are obviously people using the restaurant with its cozy and cheerful atmosphere as their own offices.

The two people who man the bakery counter where I order my sesame bagel are a couple of guys in their twenties who are always very polite and friendly and say, "Hi, nice to see you! How are you today?" Only the other day, one of them, the one with the glasses, made a misstep that embarrassed all three of us and reminded me of the many times when I have had to get the tire iron out of the trunk of my van to pry my foot out of my mouth.

Through the doors the other day, laden down with my giant purse, the laptop bag and a satchel full of books, happy to see that I was the only person in line, since I felt very certain that my shoulder was about to be dislocated. I staggered to the glass counter and set down the satchel at my feet with an "Ooof!" and looked up to find both men smiling at me in their how-can-I-help-you sort of way.

"Well, hello, young lady," the one with the glasses said jovially. "Sesame bagel? Cup of coffee?"

For some reason, his greeting took me aback and made me goggle at him slightly. Which I'm sure led to an attractive facial expression. It's just that I decided right then that there are times when someone my age can be addressed as "young lady," and those times, specifically, are times when I'm being spoken to by an elderly person. Because to them, I am a young lady.

But being addressed as "young lady" by a guy who obviously just graduated from high school - or more to the point, graduated from a bottle to a sippy cup -- within the past couple of years, well. It seemed cheeky and condescending, as if he was actually saying, "I am acknowledging the fact that you are two weeks older than dirt, but trying to assure you, through the medium of humor, that you look every day of your advanced years, plus a decade." And for me to reply, "I'd like a sesame bagel and a medium coffee, old gaffer," didn't have quite the same zing to it. Since, you know, Cary Grant.

It was awkward. I didn't really want it to be awkward because I don't think the young man was intentionally trying to be boorish in his behavior. But, you know, awkward nonetheless. The other guy sprang into action at the register, rang in my order and gave me my total; I handed over my debit card. The bold one with the glasses cleared his throat nervously and grabbed my bagel from the display case, turning his back to slice it and send it through the toaster. His very back seemed to be saying WhydidIsaythatWhydidIsaythatWHYDIDISAYTHAT?

"Would it help," the other young man whispered, returning my debit card to me, "if I told you that he's on a work release program from an institution for the socially inept?"

I laughed good-naturedly. "I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Because I am very, very old."

But Young Glasses wasn't done yet. "Can I carry your bags to a table for you?" he gabbled, turning around with a tray holding my toasted bagel and a mug.

I fixed him with a look, only slightly truculent. "Are you asking because you make a habit of helping ladies to their tables, or is this more a matter of you assisting the feeble octogenarians who come through the door?"

Then we all had a good chuckle and he manfully shouldered my laptop bag and satchel - I carried my purse and the tray with my bagel and coffee cup - and when he set everything down at the table I indicated, I resisted the urge to pinch his cheek and say, "Aren't you just the sweetest boy? I bet your mommy is very proud of you!"

RED ALERT! (How to make your house presentable for unexpected guests)

My high-school friend Cathy had a very clever mother. Mrs. Watt designed a system for doing an inst-tidy on the house in the event of unexpected guests that she called the "red alert." If Mrs. Watt hung up the telephone right after saying, "Oh, it will just be so lovely to see all of you!" depending on the state of the household at that moment, her next words, addressed to the family were "RED ALERT!"

This was the signal for everyone to hastily drop whatever they were doing and go to whatever station in the house had been assigned to them and start cleaning like they'd just heard that Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the Pope were coming over to discuss the defeat on communism. (Yes, this was the 1980s.) I don't remember specifically what Mrs. Watt had everyone do, but I was reminded of the red alert when I was reading a magazine article titled "How to Get Your House Ready for Guests." I won't name the magazine because I generally like it very much, but this particular article was just all kinds of bogus.

First of all, the piece laid out plans for what to do if you had two hours to prepare, one half-hour to prepare and fifteen minutes to prepare and one of the suggestion for the half-hour scenario was "Wipe down the kitchen cabinets."

Huh? So I should wipe down the kitchen cabinets to impress my guests, but ignore the skillet with cooked-on scrambled eggs soaking in the sink? If unexpected guests are coming over to my place and I've got a bare thirty minutes to prepare for their arrival, wiping down the fronts of my cabinets is about the last thing on my list, coming right before "Wax the mailbox" and "Paint the house."

There were a few other boneheaded instructions, one of them being "Change the sheets on the guest room bed." Now, listen to me. I've been keeping house since I was twenty-two years old, for five years as a single lady and twenty as a wife, and never once in all that time have I had an unanticipated overnight guest. I don't know: maybe word has gotten around about the comfort level of the mattress on that bed. But anyway, of all the overnight guests we've had, I knew about them enough in advance to change the sheets well before the two-hours-til-arrival stage. I might not wipe down the fronts of my kitchen cabinets more than a couple times a year, but I know what's what when it comes to having a freshly-sheeted bed ready for guests, and I bet you do too.

So I made my own list. Here it is:

FOR GUESTS ARRIVING IN 15 MINUTES:

If your house has that lived-in look ours invariably gets -- magazines and newspapers and books flung higgledy-piggledy on every available horizontal surface, a few dishes in the sink, crumbs on the counter, offensive globs of toothpaste clinging to the interior surface of the bathroom sinks, a light layer of dust, an empty toilet paper spindle on the holder -- here's my advice in one simple step:

1. Go to the shed out back and retrieve the can of gasoline you have stashed there - you can tell the fire chief later that it was meant for the lawn mower -- and after all family members and pets are safely out of your home, douse the downstairs in gas and set the place ablaze. When your inconsiderate guests arrive, they'll find you weeping and wringing your hands on the sidewalk in front of your residence, and be forced to take you to the Olive Garden for a sympathy meal. Because we all know that, unless your family consists of fourteen Navy Seals, there's no way the place is going to be presentable to guests who have the temerity to give you only fifteen minutes' notice of their arrival.

You can sort everything out with your insurance agent later, at a time when you're expecting no company.

FOR GUESTS ARRIVING IN HALF AN HOUR:

1. Grab a laundry basket and tear through the house, picking up clutter and tossing it in. Don't forget your desk. Put the laundry basket in the laundry room and SHUT THE DOOR FIRMLY. Put a gun in the waistband of your pants at the small of your back so that you can sweetly threaten to shoot any non-immediate family member who tries to go in there. Dead guests tell no tales.

Dirty dishes in the sink? My advice is to obtain RIGHT NOW one of those Rubbermaid plastic dishpans. Use it to stack dirty dishes in. Carry it to the laundry room, put it on the washer or wherever. If you want to, cover it up with a dish towel. Shut the laundry room door.

2. Grab the duster - I have ones made of that lamb fluff because I think they work the best - and give it a spritz with Endust, which is a miracle product equaled only by the Swiffer line of housekeeping products. At a brisk pace, go through the downstairs and run that duster over all tables, the fireplace mantel, the piano, the bookshelves.

3. Light some scented candles. Because that's what they're for, after all: to remove your funky family smell. Did you think they were designed to create a homey ambiance in your home? Well, that too, but trust me: Yankee can cover up a multitude of stinkiness.

4. Fluff up the sofa cushions and throw pillows. Either neatly re-fold any sloppy-looking throw blankets or take them back to the laundry room and dump them in the basket.

5. Go to the classical music channel on your cable and turn on something erudite yet soothing. It will make you seem cultured and unflappable. Who would ever dream that the same woman who has Mozart or Debussy playing ebulliently through the speakers is the same woman who, mere moments before, was galloping around her house shrieking, "PICK UP THOSE SHOES RIGHT NOW OR YOU ARE DEAD!"

6. Go to the guest bathroom. Put out a fresh hand towel. Empty the wastebasket. Get that container of disinfectant wipes out and wipe down the toilet and the sink. Get out a Windex wipe and go over the mirror, any under-glass artwork on the walls and the faucets. The back of the toilet tank is a dust-magnet: wipe it down too. Note that when you have to do something fast, those containers of wipes are a fabulous thing to have on hand. Got a nice candle for the bathroom? Light it.

7. If you can manage it, run the vacuum in the living room and entry way if you have carpet. If you have "hardwoods," as the House Hunters so often say, get out your Swiffer dust mop, attach one of those cling-sheet thingies to it and go over the floors fast.

8. Don't forget yourself. Take a look at your hair, your top, the state of your makeup. Do whatever you can do as quickly as you can do it.

9. Because it bears repeating: DO NOT LET ANYONE IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM.

Naturally, all this will go faster if you have family members to pitch in and help, but I have proved that these things can be accomplished by one woman in one half hour, and I even managed to look moderately sane when the doorbell rang.

FOR GUESTS ARRIVING IN AN HOUR:

1. Do everything on the above list, except at a slightly slower pace.

2. If you haven't made your bed, go make it. Unless your bedroom is upstairs, in which case, keep everyone on the first floor.

3. Here's a new thing I just learned: Keep some of these cute little hors d'oeuvres from Nancy's on hand in the freezer. They are delish and so easy: Just pop them on a baking sheet and put them in the oven. I try to have a couple of bottles of white wine available ( always Barefoot, always chardonnay or Moscato ) for my drinking friends and some two-liter bottles of Sprite and Sprite Zero for the teetotalers. That always seems a little classier than plunking a can of Coke down on a coaster beside a visitor. You will look like some kind of Martha Stewart whiz-kid, and it won't be any trouble at all.

4. Still don't let anyone in that laundry room. Keep that gun ready.

Why I have a splitting headache

I woke up in the middle of the night last night and couldn't go back to sleep because that's just what I do, and a maddening thing it is. Getting up in the small hours does afford me the opportunity to see some really quality television programming -- who doesn't enjoy a gripping infomercial touting the many benefits of wearing that new permutation (emphasis on the mutation) of the Snuggie, the Forever Lazy. The primo advantage of wearing the Forever Lazy, a garment which appears to have been manufactured by Satan's minions in the lower realms of hell, is that it features a drop seat. To, you know, allow you to stay warm and cozy and un-pee-soaked. This attribute is spoken of in glowing terms in that commercial I linked to above. Lucky us!

That commercial itself is freakish and awkward and only funny if you can quickly put yourself in an ironic frame of mind. The most awful scene, in my jaded view, is the one where the three couples are having a tailgate party, drinking beers and passing around the snacks, every last one of them attired in the Forever Lazy. I just have to say right here that if my husband ever made a triumphant appearance from the front seat of our van dressed in one of these....things....my first question wouldn't be "Who's lookin' awesome?" but "I wonder if the Forever Lazy is flame retardant?" But not to worry. My husband wouldn't wear one of those things, even if it came in the combined colors of Notre Dame, the Bengals and the Reds.

The second as-seen-on-TV item I saw wasn't clothing-related, thank the holy saints and angels, but instead a piece of jewelry. It is called the Titanic Coal Necklace, and the commercial made me goggle at the television screen in horror, all my irony leaking out of my toes and into my furry slippers.

"Commemorate the legacy of Titanic's tragic voyage with the 100th Anniversary Collector's Edition Necklace," the ad burbles. I sat there numbly thinking, Legacy? You mean the legacy of all those people drowning and/or freezing in the North Atlantic? The legacy where there weren't enough lifeboats, so the people in steerage were locked in to face their doom? Fun! I'd like four! Where's the phone number and my credit card!

So this necklace is apparently crafted out of actual coal retrieved from the murky ocean floor, encased in "ocean blue glass." "When you wear the 100th Anniversary Collection Necklace, you're preserving and commemorating the memory of Titanic." Scrumptious!

The fact that this necklace is made of that ocean-blue glass makes me very suspicious that the makers, the R.M.S. Titanic Inc. have been curled up in front of the television with some popcorn and a box of tissues, undoubtedly frocked out in their Forever Lazies, watching that execrable movie starring Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet as the passionate and soggy lovers, instead of reading the real history of the ship. That movie featured a huge, heart-shaped sapphire and diamond necklace that Kate's abusive fiance was going to give her as a wedding gift and Jack, Leonardo's character, drew an erotic sketch of a saucy Rose (Winslet), reclining on a chaise and wearing nothing but that piece of jewelry, her Forever Lazy lying crumpled on the floor at Jack's feet. It was fiction. FICTION.

All this brings me to my weary question, my thought processes addled by lack of sleep: Why would anyone buy a Forever Lazy and would that person actually use that back flap? And why would anyone want to wear a necklace commemorating an underwater mausoleum?

These are the existential things I ask myself in the middle of the night, bringing on an ennui that can only be cured by breakfast at Bob Evans.