IT'S NOT EASY BEING ME

There was a time in my life when I could make it through an entire day without too much happening to me. I managed to get up, bathe and dress myself appropriately, go to work, keep house, terrorize the neighborhood, and bat my eyelashes at every handsome boy that happened my way.

In short, I was what you might call a completely normal person.

Now, I'm lucky if I can go a week without my Jack Russell terrier ratting me out whenever he commandeers this here blog. It's like I have my very own personal paparazzo at the ready to report to my adoring public every single humiliating and dumb ass thing that I've done....all in an effort to demonstrate how much better his life would have been had he been adopted by a smarter person.

So for the record....

Yes, I did manage to de-fuzz my legs yesterday, but not without incident. Apparently, one should put in one's contact lenses before operating sharp implements, because when I went to slather on the Johnson's 24-hour Lilac and Chamomile baby lotion that is supposed to de-stress me, I discovered that I had nicked just about every important artery that one might have in one's legs, and I was now going to require a tourniquet. Or several tourniquets.

That positively sucked.

Then, as I was sitting at my appointment yesterday, I happened to glance down at my knees, and realized that I had missed shaving them completely. So there I sat in my paper gown with four boxes of band aids applied in a rather artful fashion (if I do say so myself), and at the mid point of each leg was a knobby knee covered in five o'clock shadow. If I would have had one available to me, I would have taken a Sharpie and drawn on a couple of faces just under the knee caps, and my new friends would have had little buzz cut hairdos. Sheesh.

Today I ran errands and did the grocery shopping for the next month and a half. I say this, because I don't care if I am out of everything edible within an eight mile radius of my house...you can't make me go back there. I should have known better, really. Friday afternoons before a Notre Dame home football game are not exactly optimal for doing anything in public. Every single obnoxious alumna (note that I am only bitching about the female form of the beast here) decides to descend upon my little 'burb of Mishawaka and you would think that there was one big collective barn in which they were all raised. Not one nice manner among the lot of 'em. Daft cows.

So I bought everything in the store, successfully packed it all into the back of the car (whose name is Dottie, by the way), and drove home with the windows down and Def Leppard blaring away on the radio. (I'm dangerous with that Sirius satellite thingie, I tell ya.)

Everything was going just fine until I started hauling grocery bags into the kitchen. To get to said kitchen, you have to come in through the laundry room, turn right to go down a hallway (that I like to call the "gallery" because it sounds so damn sophisticated, don't you know), and then turn left into the kitchen.

If you're a semi-normal person and relatively steady on your feet and in overall decent physical shape, this is a complete no brainer.

But this is me we're talking about.

Allow me to re-create the scene: Masochistic bag boy who decided to make each bag weigh nine hundred pounds, sore arms from trying to clean the house as if Martha Stewart her very self were coming over, an errant dryer sheet on the floor, and a dog who has enough toys strewn around to populate a large PetSmart. Add to that my propensity for hanging too many damn pictures in too small a damn space, inadequate undergarments to house my droopy bosoms, and me drenched in sweat, and you've got the picture, even if it isn't very pretty.

I stepped into the laundry room, caught that damn dryer sheet full on, slid into a half herky jerk kind of cheerleader split configuration, watched in horror as "the girls" decided to break free from the four dollar K-mart bra that I figured would be good for wearing while doing yard work and such, and then spun around and stepped on a tennis ball that my damn dog won't play with because he decided that green is no longer on his color wheel. As I flailed about in some kind of half-assed pitiful attempt to stay upright, I swiped all of the cross stitched pieces off of one wall, smashed the grocery bag containing the eggs into another wall, and then skated into the kitchen on two wheels as though the entire episode was some kind of freakish Ice Capades finale. All that was missing was a banana peel and Wiley Coyote.

So forgive me if I forego the stitchy talk and pics today. I'm thinking that I should put myself to bed with a cold compress on my head and the telephone number of a good insurance agent programmed into the mobile. With any luck, I'll wake up and it will be Tuesday and Stewey will have stocked the fridge, made a few meals, wiped up the mess in the gallery and finished the laundry...all in the spirit of giving a girl a break.

Have a wonderful weekend, and don't do anything I would do...