THE SPINSTER ABOUT TOWN

Well, good morning, Dearies!

Today, I am doing my very best to impersonate an actual live functioning adult. I have outside clothings on, my old lady sneakers are doing their thing, and I'm remembering to smile and breathe.

In that order.

I started at the lab for my twice-monthly kidney workup, and now I am sitting in the Panera trying not to look like a crackpot spinster slurping damn good and eating a sesame bagel, while furiously typing away on my iPad thingie, that I was smart enough to bring.

From here I'm heading to the car wash (if it doesn't rain), then to the Targets to get my glasses adjusted, FedEx to return a big bag of clothes from the big lady store (that were, ironically, too big), then off to the Goodwill to finally get rid of the two bags of clothes I purged from the closet.

Last.

Year.

My Cottage Care lovies are doing their thing, so when I finally return home to CS2, everything will be puffed and fluffed and sparkly clean and disinfected to within an inch of its life. It might not be Amish woman on a rant clean, but it will definitely be better than I could do in my decrepitude.

So I did a thing and started watching those Damn Housewives again. This time it's the Salt Lake City variety, and despite my very best attempts to do so, I have been unable to tear my eyes away. The good news is that I am, in fact, stitching while watching, so it's not a total and complete loss.  I tuned in because the news was sending me under the covers too much, but now that I'm knee deep into the drama....I wonder.  Is it possible that these Damn Housewives are no longer a guilty escape and actually WORSE than the news?

I did another dumb thing in addition to figuring out the Peacock app on the TeeVee.

I've recently joined the Notre Dame Club of St Joe Valley (my local Alumni Association club), and in the process of re-connecting myself to my beloved Alma Mater, I downloaded a copy of my transcript. Warning: If you were an absolute mess as a student (like Yours Truly), and you managed to get that big piece of paper that says you graduated by the skin of your teeth, don't go looking for humiliation by re-living your academic past.

What in the heck was I thinking? My adult self looked at my second semester Freshman year and said "How in the h-e-double hockey sticks did you decide to take THAT schedule of classes?!"  I took seven hundred and fifty thousand credit hours, and the class list was: Biology, Economics, Calculus, Geology, Sociology, Psychology, and Gym.

Um. Spinster? You wanted to be a lawyer. You love to read and write and look at pretty things. Why in the world would you have subjected yourself to that kind of failure?

Well, fail I did. I returned home to ElPaso (where Mom and Dad were living at the time) on academic probation, completely mortified, and begging them to let me go back to Lima, marry my high school boyfriend, and raise chickens.

Fortunately for me, my Dad really was the smartest guy in the room, because he peered over the top of the newspaper and said "Do your thing, CJ. If that's what you need to do to be happy...go right ahead and let us know how it works out for you."

So I ran to the phone and called my high school boyfriend, who told me that his parents had an old trainer in a field somewhere that we could have to live in, and I said that was great, and then realized that Lima was a very long bus ride from ElPaso, so I had better get a job and make some cash for the bus ticket.

I went to work at Domino's Pizza in the telephone service center taking pizza orders. It took me about six minutes to realize that my fellow pizza order takers weren't there because they got their feelings hurt in college or because they didn't like living in a dorm.  These people were there because they had families to support, or because they didn't have the option to go to college, or because they weren't an ignorant, spoiled, clueless, stupid brat that thought "Notre Dame is just too hard".

My heiney went back to campus and planted itself in class and the library and a tiny little apartment, and it never took the experience of being there for granted ever again. (Let's not get it twisted....I was still a complete and total disaster as a student, but I tried hard and listened and really really gave it my best shot.)

Hmmmm. What is it about this Panera-sitting that sent me down THAT particular rabbit hole, I wonder?

OK, Dearies. On with the weekend. I'm going to get home, crawl back into inside clothes, get the Damn Housewives on the TeeVee, and stitch my eyeballs out. Groceries are coming at 3:00, and tonight's dinner plan is to make another lovely salad. Tomorrow I'm making a tiny little crockpot full of chili with cornbread biscuits, and on Sunday and all next week, it's going to be all about grilled chicken....grilled chicken gyros, grilled chicken salads, and grilled chicken with roasted veg.

I hope your very own weekend is exactly as you would wish it to be. I hope your heart sings and your skirt twirls all over the place. Come tell me all about it!