I Should Have Stayed in Bed

Saturday morning, I got up, filled with hope that it would be a good day.  Not.  Even.  Close.

Tim is addicted to Starbucks coffee (okay, I am too, but I settle for the home brew, his highness has to have the real McCoy), so since he is recovering from knee surgery, I decided to raise his spirits by running out and getting a couple of ventis.

As I headed down the steps into the garage, I half-turned to talk to the dog (I know, I know, but these days, she is the only one who will listen to me whine) and slipped down the last two steps, landing right on my butt on the 2x4 that makes up the one side of the stairs.  Not.  Good.

As I sat astride the plank, educating Chloe to every swear word I know and wishing that I spoke another language so I could teach her even more swear words, all I could think was:  Unless Chloe can carry me into the house or dial 911, I am going to die here.  In the garage.  Sitting on the steps.  In my PJ top, sweats and Tim's jacket (hey, it's a look), while Tim mummifies up in the bed, just steps away from the phone he can't reach.

Days from now, someone will say,"Whatever happened to the Sinclairs?"  and then a neighbor will call about a bad smell and an unusual amount of flies swarming around the house.

I began to wonder if I could teach Chloe how to bark, "My mom has fallen and she can't get up" in Morse Code, but then I realized I didn't have any treats, so...that wasn't going to happen.  Besides, I don't actually know Morse code, so it probably wouldn't have worked anyway.

As I moved on to more positive scenarios in my head of Tim and I side by side in bed (like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dumber), splitting a bag of ice and alternating the use of the heating pad, competing over who can do more leg lifts in PT, battling for control of the remote, fighting over whose turn it was to use the walker, and duking it out over the last Percoset, I realized that I was not only going to survive, but that I could actually walk again. 

I grudgingly decided to forge ahead with my mission, and drove to Starbucks where I ordered three ventis. (Hey, I not only needed two, I deserved them at this point).  The woman poured one , plunked it down on the counter and walked away while the other woman rang it up.

"Venti?" she said.

Duh.  A.  You were standing six inches away when I ordered it, B.  If you work here and don't know which cup is a venti, then you are probably too stupid to even be breathing, and C.  (this I said aloud) "Yes.  Three."

I even held up three fingers which she ignored while she blithely rang up the one.

"Twelve thousand dollars," she announced (This was Starbucks, after all)

"I need three,"  I reiterated, but made the mistake of handing her the money for all of them.

"Oh.  Uh."  She looked from the money to the register as though I had handed her a Rubik's cube and asked her to solve it while simultaneously explaining Einstein's theory of relativity in German.

"Why don't you just charge me for the one, then ring up two more," I suggested, almost, but not quite able to stop rolling my eyes.

"Um..."

Apparently, my suggestion was not computing in her razor-sharp mind, but like a dog with a bone, she was not going to give up. (If I wave a white flag, will you do the same?  Pretty please with cream and sugar on top?  How about if I just cry?)

Fifteen excruciatingly painful minutes later, I stumbled out of the Starbucks with my three ventis, and maybe the correct change, but I couldn't see past the tears in my eyes to count it as I wept for the future.

Thinking that taking the dog for a nice long walk would clear my mind and help me shake off the morning's events, I grabbed her leash and we headed out. (Okay, I actually thought that crawling back into bed and pulling the covers over my head would help, but I was guilted into the walk by a pair of big, brown eyes and a cute little button nose).

We got exactly halfway around the block when nature called and Chloe squatted in some leaves.  I leaned down with my little baggie at the ready, but couldn't find anything...because it was stuck to her furry little backside.  Eewww.

And to make the experience even better and more memorable, she plopped her little butt down on the pavement before I could stop her and I had a poopy puppy.

Somehow, yelling "NO!" For all that is holy STOP!!" after the fact seemed a bit useless, so I settled for pounding my head against the pavement and ripping out significant chunks of hair.

After carrying her the rest of the way home in order to limit the damage (to her, but apparently not my sweatshirt), I plunked her in the tub to try and scrub off eight pounds of dog poo (Seriously, how can something that small poop out that much?).  I had barely begun when the phone rang.

"Can you get that?"  Tim yelled in to me.

Some days, it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.

The Evil Queen, Er, I Mean Machine

There are very few technology-related things in life that I can do well, but using the self-checkout at the grocery store is one of them.  I can scan, bag, pay and be out the door in about five seconds.  Unless the machine turns against me.

The other day I was scanning my order when all of a sudden, it (let's call her Maleficent, shall we?)  decided she didn't like my brand of bread and refused to accept it.

"Please remove  item from bag and scan again," she intoned in her smug little voice.

So I did.

"Item not found," she informed me loftily, and instead of resetting the screen, the miserable witch put up the "need assistance" screen. 

What I needed was for Maleficent to actually do her job, not tell me I needed assistance.

Naturally, the woman in charge of "assisting" me was busy giving a tutorial to someone who had no business being in the self-checkout if she couldn't figure out the "self" part after the first thirty-six times she was shown how to scan and bag.  Although I'm sure everyone was thinking pretty much the same about me by the time I was done.

Finally, I caught her eye and she punched some buttons and brought daughter of Hal back in line.

The next item was fine.  The one after that, an issue.

Miss Assistance again pushed some more buttons, but clearly at this point she began to think that I was as clueless as a Wheel Of Fortune contestant who had bought all five vowels, guessed R, D and K and still couldn't solve an "animal names" puzzle that said: aard_ark.

Dreading the next scan, I searched my basket for something Maleficent couldn't get me on.  Aha.  Bananas.  I plopped them on the scale and quickly punched in the code.

"Item not found.  Please get assistance," she goaded me.

I gave an exasperated WTH look at little Miss Helper, who was not appreciating the self-control it was taking for me to not flip off both her and her evil machine cohort.

"What do you have there, bananas?" she asked, craning her neck to see the item I was dangling THREE FEET FROM HER FACE!

No.  These are fillet mignon masquerading as bananas, and if you're impressed by this, just wait till you see how I've disguised the zucchini.

I tried to scan some tomatoes next, but before I could even get them on the scanner, Ms. Fix-it started pushing buttons like she was a pre-teen girl trying to win Justin Bieber tickets on a radio call-in contest.

"Got it," she sang out in her shrill little holier-than-thou voice.

I glared back at her and grabbed the next item, shielding it with my body so I could scan it before her sharp little talons could peck away at any more keys.

I gave a quick swipe, but Maleficent came to her minion's defense and the next thing I knew, she was speaking to me in Spanish!

I don't know exactly what she was saying, but I got the impression it wasn't good.  She sounded kind of angry that I had challenged her authority and seemed to be cussing me out, or threatening to lock me in a tower, guarded by a fire-breathing dragon.

I backed away and shot Helpful Hannah a look that should have had her cringing and fleeing in terror.

Apparently, she didn't have the good sense that God gave a turnip because she headed towards me instead of away from me, this time stabbing the buttons on my screen instead of hers.

"Uh, I think this will work," she had at least enough brains to sound semi-concerned.

I bit my tongue against the multitude of rejoinders which were crowding my brain and backing up in my throat.

"There."  With a final flourish, she re-swiped the last item and...the evil seed responded in English.  Really loud English.  Extremely loud English.  Dogs three miles away began howling and covering their ears.

"That's kind of loud," she looked at me, aghast.

Ya think?  I would have actually said this if I thought she could hear me over the roar of the machine.

Sadly for everyone in the store...and the shopping center...we had reached the limits of the assistance she was able to give, but it didn't really matter.  The evil queen had won.  She magnanimously let me check out the last few items and leave with the minimum aggravation while her servant scuttled back to her station to lie in wait for the next hapless victim. 

Car Trouble

If Tim could, he would totally get a new car every year, or maybe even every six months.  His idea of fun is spending hour upon hour trolling car dealerships, reverently patting shiny new bumpers and stroking soft, supple leather seats.

Myself, I would rather run naked through a brier patch filled with poison ivy while being chased by a rabid dog than shop for a new car.

And that is why we make a perfect couple.  After almost eight years, it was time for me to get a new car, and, rather than endure the whining, pouting and snarky comments that bringing me car shopping elicits, Tim pored over car magazines and the internet, and narrowed my choices down to two, I picked one, and we both drove off the lot happy as little clams.

The bubble of happiness lasted exactly two weeks before it burst.

I was actually enjoying my new car, specifically the "keyless entry" feature before it all went south.  No more digging for keys in my purse like I was trying to tunnel to the center of the earth.  No more patting myself  down looking for the keys as though I was in a Macarana dance off.  Now, I simply had to have my keys and with one touch of the door handle, beep--unlock.  Beep, beep--lock.  It was....magic.

So last Monday, I stuffed my keys into my pocket, grabbed the dry cleaning with one arm, the dog with the other, my purse with my elbow, and my reusable shopping bags with my teeth and headed out to run errands.

Bank? Beep. Beep, beep.  Dry cleaners?  Beep.  Beep,beep.  Christmas wreath?  Beep.  Beep, beep.  Dog park? ----Hmm.  No beep.  Perplexed, I shifted the dog to the other arm and tried again.  ----Uh oh.  Not good.

I checked all the doors, but they were securely closed.  I double-checked the trunk where I had put my purse.  Firmly shut.  I brushed my fingers across the handle yet again.  No beep.  I tried another handle.  No beep.  Another hand.  No beep.  My knuckles.  No beep.  An elbow, nose, chin, knee and big toe.  Nothing.  Chloe's paw, her tail, her nose, the tips of her ears.  No beep.

Aggravated, I got back into the car, pushed the button and it started up just fine.  Huh.  That was strange.

I got back out and tried my touching routine all over again, except this time, I included the five basic ballet positions, a downward dog, part of a pussycat doll routine and a few moves I once saw at the Cirque du Soliel.  Still no beep beep.  Not even a beeee.

By now, I was starting to draw a small crowd and Chloe was looking at me the way I looked at my mom when I was 12 and she danced the hustle at a relative's wedding; equal parts horror, fascination and alarm.

I gave one last valiant effort by removing the actual key from the electronic "key", but even that wouldn't lock the car.  Okay, so now even and old-fashioned, unsophisticated key wouldn't work?  How does that happen?

Since the dealership was less than a mile away, I decided to head over there before one of the people watching decided to call either the men in white coats or the police to take me away (Honest, officer, I swear it's my car.).

As I pulled into the lot, the salesman just happened to be there with another customer.

"Hey! How's it going?"  Big, broad smile.

"Not so good.  My key stopped working."

"Let me see," he performed the same voodoo rituals I had done, to no avail.  "Oh dear."  Not such a big smile now.  Meanwhile, his customer suddenly remembered elective brain surgery he had been putting off and fled, er, I mean left.  "Take it around to the service bay."

When I arrived, the mechanic was waiting for me.

"Let's see what we can do," he declared jovially.

Yeah.  You're smiling now.  We all start out that way.  But you won't be smiling for long. 

He took the key from me and...beep.  Beep, beep.

No way.  Uh uh.  That did not just happen.

But then he got cocky and tried to show off by making it happen again.  This time though, silence...

Frowning, he tried again, and again.  No beep.

"Give me a few minutes," he said, walking away and shaking his head.

I decided to take the dog for a little walk while he was gone and returned to find him writing me a voucher for a cab home.

"It's the strangest thing," he scratched his head,  "the computer is saying the car doesn't even recognize the key.  Do you have the spare key with you?"

Uh.  No.  I don't usually need two keys to run errands.  "Sorry," I shook my head.

"We'll send you home in a cab and call you first thing in the morning.  Do you need anything out of your car?  Because it's locked and we can't get in, and if I use the actual key, the alarm will go off and we can't turn it off."

A.  Of course I need the stuff in my car, but apparently I can't get it, so why bother to even ask, other than to torture me and

B.  What do you mean the alarm will go off?!!?  You mean that would have happened to me at the park?  Perhaps that is a little detail you should tell people when they buy the car?  "Oh, don't ever use your key because that will cause the alarm so sound, deafening you and everyone else within a twelve block radius, but the upside is, there is no way to stop it."

As we walked by the car on the way out, it suddenly unlocked.  Beep.

We looked at each other, startled, then tried a handle again.  Beep, beep.

"Are you sure you don't have the other key?" the guy asked me.

Suddenly, it came to me, a hazy memory of dropping a key in my purse the previous week. 

Oops.  My bad.  Chagrined, I reached into my purse and pulled out the key.  Apparently, they key only locks the car from outside, not from in the trunk, and the key I thought was for my car was actually for Tim's.

"Maybe you could put a colored sticker on the keys to tell them apart," the car guy suggested, somehow managing not to laugh outright in my face.

Meanwhile, I was busy trying to figure out how I could blame the whole thing on Tim and wondering where I was going to get my car serviced from now on.

He Said, She Said

Last week, we had our generator installed.  This week, we had our generator installed.  The three day process had to be split up between two weeks, because why should they limit the pain to only one week when they could screw up two?

So anyway, last week went something like this...

Monday morning.

He said: Ma'am, if it's okay, we need to turn your power off for an hour, no  more than an hour and a half, so we can work on the electric box.

He meant:  SUCKER!  If you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida I'd like to sell you.  Oh, and I hope you want to sit in the dark all day, and eat whatever you can forage from your cabinet, because you are not going to see power any time soon.

I said:  Um, okay, but we'll have power by this afternoon, right?  Because our tree is being delivered and they need to plug in their saw.

I meant:  Do I have a choice?  Isn't that why I am sitting here all day instead of having an actual life?  Oh, and if you really are only an hour and a half, I'll run outside and look for those flying pigs.

He said:  Is it okay to park in your driveway?

He meant:  We've already parked four large trucks in your driveway and are going to leave them there all day.  By the way, the other three guys are going to leave, taking the keys with them, so that even when we're done in the house, you are still trapped like a prisoner under house arrest.  Don't even think of trying to leave.  Mwahahaha.

I said:  Um, okay.

I meant:  Um, okay.

I later thought (when I realized my predicament) Really??? In what alternate universe did this seem like a good idea?  Exactly how far is your head up your butt?  Grrr.

Monday afternoon (3 hours later) the tree guys arrive.  Still no power.

Tree guys said:  Uh, is there a switch you have to flip for this outlet to work?

They meant:  Uh, is there a switch you have to flip for this outlet to work?

I said:  Let me talk to the guys working on the generator and see if they can turn the power back on.

I meant:  They will turn the power back on, or they will be picking pieces of Christmas tree out of their...uh...teeth.  Yeah, teeth.

He said:  Oh, we can run a line for you to use.

He meant:  Yeah.  Across the yard from where they are and then sit back and watch them drag a ten foot tree back and forth.  Hehehe

Tree guys said:  Thanks

They meant:  For NOTHING.  Oh, and next year, the day you want the tree delivered, we're busy.

This week went something like this:

Monday morning, the doorbell rang at 9am.  There stood a guy in front of a huge truck with a forklift on the back.

He said:  I'm delivering this for today.  Can I park it in front, partly on your lawn?

He meant:  I am totally wasting your time right now because no matter what you say, I'm going to put it where I want and there is nothing you can do about it.  Nanny, nanny, na na.

I said:  No, you can't park it on my lawn even a little bit.  How about parking it over there, on the gravel only?

I meant:  Would you want a forklift parked on your lawn?  What do we look like here, the Beverly Hillbillies?  Yeah.  Sure.  Park it between the rusted-out pick-up that we have up on blocks and the C-ment pond.  I'll have Jethro clear a space for you.  Duh.

Later Monday morning, the doorbell rang again.  There stood a guy in front of said forklift while his buddy ran it through my flowerbed and dug a trench into the lawn that you could lose a small child in.

He said:  Do you think your neighbor would mind if we took the forklift into his yard?  We can't get the unit onto the pad from this angle.

He meant:  I am trying to win an award for stupidest man on the face of the earth.  Based on the question I just asked you, how am I doing?

I said:  YES, HE WOULD MIND!  I'm not happy about what you did to my yard, and I'm the one getting the generator.

I meant:  Seriously?  Did your mother have any children that lived?  My yard looks like the marines were using it to practice war games and you're asking me if you can do the same thing to my neighbor's yard?  Oh, and if my rosebushes and cherry tree are in your way, just plow right over them.  Ooops.  Wait.  Too late.  You already did.  Grrrrrrr.

I Am A Mushroom

After this last year of Snowmaggedon, earthquakes and hurricanes, we decided to bite the bullet and get a generator.

Oh.  Wait.  Tim decided to get the generator and I have to bite the bullet.  Yeah.  That's how it went.

So, two weeks ago, I got a call from someone named Sally who said she was from company ABC (one of the companies Tim had contacted for an estimate).  Expectant Pause.

"Okay.  And...?"  Was I supposed to burst into a round of applause complete with whistles, cheers and stomps, or would she prefer an award of some kind?

"What can I do for you?"  Sally asked brightly, obviously hoping to provoke some kind of reaction other than confused silence.

"I give up.  What can you do for me?"  Um.  Hello.  You called me!

Second pause.  Clearly, this conversation was not going according to Sally's plan.  Whatever that was.

"Uh,"  some of the perkiness left Sally voice.  "I'm calling for Sean...?"

Oh. You're calling for Sean?  Well why didn't you say so in the first place.  Now I understand everything.  Just a couple of quick questions though:  Who is Sean, and exactly how lazy and/or incompetent is he that you have to make the call for him?

"Sean is the one who sold you the generator...?"  Sally volunteered another piece of the puzzle while I was still struggling to voice my last question in a less snarky way than the version that was running through my head.

"I didn't know I had bought a generator, but now I know what the problem is,"  the light bulb finally went on, and I knew who to blame for the confusing morass Sally and I were currently mired in.  "You see, my husband must have been dealing with Sean and he thinks I am a mushroom."

"A mushroom?"  Sally echoed, sounding more than a little afraid of the answer.  I'm pretty sure that at this point, she was plotting ways to get even with Sean...ex-lax in the coffee perhaps?...for putting her through this torture.

"Yes," I answered, similarly plotting my own form of vengeance on Tim, but he would not get off as lightly as ex-lax.  "A mushroom.  He keeps me in the dark and feeds me sh--, er, I mean he obviously didn't tell me what he did."  I finished lamely.

Sally meanwhile was more than a little giddy with relief that she was not speaking with someone she would later have to tell the police interviewer "seemed a little off, but I never imagined she'd take out all those poor, poor people with her.".

"Okay, well, I think I'm supposed to set up a time to come out and install the generator," she said.

And you couldn't have led with that and saved us both this ridiculously painful conversation?  I mean, c'mon, Sally.  Work with me on this.  And what do you mean, you think?  Don't you know what you were supposed to do?  Really?  Are you a mushroom too?

Sally offered me installation as early as the following week.  Wow! I thought.  So soon!  That never happens when dealing with people in the service industry, or at least not without divine intervention or a really big payoff.   Sally, you rock!  And then she dropped the bomb.  Installation would take three days.

Three days?!?  I have to sit at home for three days?  Are you installing a generator or building a wing onto the house for this thing?  Maybe you are assembling it on site from scratch.  Perhaps the installer is legally blind and the installation instructions are written in Sanskrit.  I know, it's being put into place by a team of highly trained snails who will then turn it on, hop in, douse themselves with garlic and wine and become escargot.  Three days?  At home?

"Well, officer, she seemed fairly normal when we arrived on Monday.  We never saw the homicidal rage coming on Wednesday afternoon until it was too late."

Tim was sooo going to hear about this.  I was emailing him even as I was resignedly circling the days on a calendar like a prisoner about to enter solitary confinement.  And I don't care what anyone says, they weren't getting my shoelaces and belt.  I had to have something to keep my busy for three days.

Within an hour or so, I heard back from Tim, who had the gall, the nerve, the utter temerity to chastise me for scheduling the installation on days we would be out of town.

We will?

Yes, we're leaving on Tuesday and won't be back till Friday.

Oh?  And when were you planning on sharing that little gem?  Monday night?  Why don't you just get Sally to call me up about an hour before we take off on Tuesday and have her tell me what's going on?

"Honest officer, I never saw it coming.  I mean, sure, she muttered under her breath and maybe her eyes did circle in opposite directions, but I just thought she was a bit eccentric.  I never suspected anything like this.  Have you even found a piece of Mr. Sinclair?  No?  Not even a lock or hair or a fingernail?"

I am.  A mushroom.

Blinded By The Light

When I was young, my Aunt Margie would spend every Christmas with us, and make decorating the tree about as much fun as a root canal.

"No, no!  You can't hang Rudolph near Mickey."

Why?  Are they mortal enemies?  Can we put Dumbo next to Mickey, or do you think that'll start a stampede?

"Stop!  The blue bells go at the top, they're breakable."

Okay.  I'm fifteen, not five, and they are from K-Mart, not Swarovski.  If I promise not to ride my tricycle in the house, can we hang at least one bell under the six-foot mark?  Pleeeease, can we, huh?

"Wait.  String the lights from top to bottom, not side to side.  And start inside and work out.  You want to give the tree depth."

Um.  You are aware the tree is plastic right?  With metal "limbs"?  And since our lights are from, like, 1935, I'm pretty sure just having them in the same room constitutes a fire hazard, let alone  putting them inside the tree.  Besides, don't you think the tree kind of glows in the dark as it is?

With this scene played out Christmas after Christmas, it's no wonder I am scared for life.

So when Tim and I had our first Christmas, I convinced him to get a pre-lit tree, and then I hung glass bulbs on all the lowest branches.  Hehehe (and then I ran with scissors and went swimming 58 minutes after eating--what can I say, I was young and crazy!)

But last year, Tim talked me into getting a real tree.  He promised faithfully that he would do all the lights by himself.  I would not have to re-live my childhood nightmare.

After about two hours, our tree boasted several hundred lights, woven in, out, up, down and side to side.  It twinkled like a float in Disney's Electric Parade.  Proudly, Tim showed off his handiwork.

"You can't even see the wires, and I used ten boxes of lights," he bragged.

"Okay, you're hired,"  I told him.  "You get to do the lights every year from now on."

And then this year, disaster struck. 

After thirty-two years of dealing with a bad knee, Tim needs a replacement.  That means surgery, weeks of rehab, and lots of pain, both before and after the surgery.

But enough about Tim.  Let's talk real pain, my pain.  This year, I had to put up the lights.

I decided to do it while he was at work, so the fool wouldn't try to climb a ladder with a bad knee.  He called as I was plugging in the first strand, and in a moment of weakness (or insanity), I told him what I was about.

"I'll do it," he roared at me.  "You'll do it wrong.  Leave it till I get home tonight."

Gee, thanks Aunt Margie.  I've got to get off the phone now because I'm having a flashback and I can't hear you over the voices in my head.

So with that vote of confidence, and wishing I could start drinking at 9am on a Wednesday, I began to string the lights.

In and out, up and down, round and round I wrapped, unwrapped and rewrapped those stupid lights.  Morning turned to afternoon as I added strand after strand.  Up the ladder, down the ladder.  Stop and back up to make sure I didn't miss any spots.  My lights just had to live up to last year's display, or I would never hear the end of it.

Somewhere around 3:00, I was about halfway done and wondering how Tim was able to finish in two hours when it was taking me six, when another disaster struck.  I ran out of lights.

Dumbfounded, I stared at the tree.  How could I have used all the lights and not be done?  And what should I do now, spend another day unwinding and rewinding the lights?

Nope.  No way.  Not gonna happen.

I took a picture of the unfinished tree and sent it to Tim, then hopped in the car, drove to Target and bought the last nine boxes of lights they had.

In the meantime, Tim called, howling with laughter.  "I'm married to Clark Griswald from Christmas Vacation!"

"Do you think it's too bright?" I asked.

"Too bright?  When we fire that bad boy up, we're going to take down the whole Eastern seaboard.  Good thing we're having a generator put in.  We'll need it just to light the tree.  I think you can see it from space.  But on the bright side, Santa won't need Rudolph to find our house.  He might need sunglasses and SPF 60, but he sure can't miss it!  Hey, I'll bet your parents can see it from Florida.  Tell them to step outside and look north."

Great.  I married Shecky Sinclair.

The abuse continued when he came home, but the worst part was, the extra nine boxes were still not enough, and I had to spend most of Thursday tracking down the same kind of lights, which apparently no one but Target sells. (But I will save that for another blog)

I've made up my mind though.  Next year, we're going to a beach somewhere and decorate a palm tree.  How many lights could that take?

Waaaay Too Much Information

What would the holidays be without family...relaxing?...enjoyable?...stress free?  Oh, did I say that out loud?  I meant boring, sad and stressful . 

I love my family.  Really.  But based on last week and Christmas of last year, I am thinking of joining the witness relocation program.  I hear Antarctica is lovely this time of year.

You see, the problem is that my parents have thankfully enjoyed good health, my father in particular.  He prides himself on the fact that he has not needed a doctor since he was in the navy, so last Christmas, when tragedy struck, it was, well, tragic.

The day after Christmas, my dad was literally blown off his feet by an unexpected gust of wind and thrown to the ground.  Fortunately, he just ended up with a boo boo on his bottom and a pulled muscle, according to the ER doctor.  And our doctor five days later.  And the x-rays.  And Web MD.  And Marcus Welby.  And the entire cast of Gray'sAnatomy,  and The Practice.

But no matter what everyone told him, he was convinced  he might never walk again...and have to live with us instead of flying back to Florida with my mom.

For an entire week, we had to hear, in great and excruciating detail, about his boo boo.  We were treated to vivid descriptions of the size, location and severity of the bruise.  We lived through his brave attempts to walk five feet without the walker, cane, forklift, or tow-line.  We grinned and bore hearing about the indignity of sitting on a glorified whoopee cushion for meals.

We tried to distract him with the Food Network, Angry Birds and his granddaughter, but nothing captured his attention or imagination the way his boo boo did.  He just knew the doctors were all wrong and he had broken something.  He was sure that he had at least torn a ligament or severed a tendon.  It was the beginning of the end.  He would end up bedridden for the rest of his days, eating gruel and making macrame potholders.

So, to ease the pain (ours), we gave him drugs.  The doctor had prescribed pain pills and muscle relaxants, but the man who was never sick or injured a day in his life didn't want to take them.  We told him it was him or us, but those drugs were going to put someone out of their pain. 

This, of course, opened up a whole new set of issues.

While I am totally consumed with my dog's poops--size, frequency, form and texture--I really, really, really do not need to even know about my father's.

"Do you know that it says here this medication can cause constipation?" he demanded, waving the sheaf of papers at me that now come with every prescription.

"It also says it can cause you to cluck like a chicken or spontaneously break into the dance of the sugar plum fairy, but hey, let's look on the bright side, and maybe it will just make you feel better and your biggest worry will be finding a six-fingered glove for the new thumb that will sprout."

Every day, we got a potty update, along  with dire predictions of being unable to board the plane for home when the holiday ended.

"I'm fine flying back alone," my mother chirped, seeing a light at the end of her tunnel.

I believe our response was something along the lines of, "Look, we love dad to death, but he is getting on that plane if we have to buy an extra ticket and strap him to our back like a piece of carry-on luggage."

Fortunately for everyone involved, he got on the plane.

Last week, it was my mother's turn.  She had a doctor's appointment here, so she flew in the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

Monday morning, I drove her to the doctor, and waited for her.  After about a half hour, she came out, looked surreptitiously around the empty waiting room, and said, "I'll tell you what the doctor said later."

Thinking she meant in the privacy or the car or back at the house, I nodded in agreement.  No such luck.

As we entered the elevator, the crowded elevator, she launched into a blow-by-blow account of her visit...which would have been fine had we been at the eye doctor, but we had unfortunately been to a doctor for women's issues.

I am still waking up at night in a cold sweat.

At first, I tried to pretend I was just some poor, random stranger this woman had targeted to share intimate details with.  "Uh huh," I murmured half-heartedly as she used the V word for, like, the forty-seventh time in three minutes.  I wondered what the penalty was for pulling the fire alarm.  I even briefly contemplated actually setting myself on fire.  My mother, oblivious to the lack of response, chattered on.

"So you thought the doctor was nice?" I desperately tried to nudge the subject onto a path strewn with less personal information when I could no longer pretend I didn't know her.

"Oh, yes.  She said..."  And she was off and running again with things that had people bailing out of that elevator like it was a 70's disaster movie, and the director had just called "Action!".

And the best part of it was, it never ended.  Not in the lobby, not in the elevator down to the garage, not in the car, not at Toys R Us where we did some Christmas shopping.  I kept hearing about parts of my mother that I don't even want to know exist.  And there was no escape.

By the time she flew back to Florida, I was waxing nostalgic over my father's boo boo and ensuing poop issues.

Can't wait for Christmas this year.

Who's Training Who?

I have decided that I am not cut out to be a dog trainer.  And the dog knows it.

The problem is, I grew up with cats.  You call a cat and they walk away.  You tell them to sit, and they walk away.  You offer food, and they walk away.  To be fair, there are some exceptions to those rules, such as: 1. the cat doesn't feel like walking away.  In that case,they will curl up with their back to you and yawn. 2.  They have a use for you.  They may need an itch scratched or a warm, comfy place to sit, and 3. you offer something really good to eat like shrimp, fresh Maine lobster or ahi tuna, lightly seared.  They actually may deign to sample it, if the presentation is up to their standards.

I loved my cats, but I accepted early on that I merely existed to serve their every whim and never tried to train them.  Period.

But a dog?  They are supposed to be trained.  They want to be trained.  They beg to be trained.  And it's a piece of cake, right?  Yeah.

Based on these totally erroneous assumptions fostered by doggie propaganda films like Benji, Lassie, and Rin Tin Tin, I decided to give it a shot. 

The first thing I did was buy every book I saw.  I got Dog Training for Idiots, Dog Training for Dummies, Dog Training for People Who Are Too Stupid to be Idiots or Dummies.  I watched all those training shows on the dog TV channel:  AKC Training, How to Train Your Puppy, How to Train Your Dragon, The Dog Whisperer, The Horse Whisperer, and The Ghost Whisperer.  Anything that I thought might help.  And what a colossal waste of time and money that was.

You see, the problem was, all those things are for training perfect dogs who live in fantasy land.

Make the dog walk on your left, at your heel.  Don't let them pull ahead, they tell you.  Uh huh.  That is supposing your dog will walk AT ALL!

Unlike every dog these people worked with, our dog would go approximately five feet, then throw  herself down on the street as though she had just trekked across the Sahara, pulling a covered wagon loaded with bricks.

Firmly tugging on the leash and using a firm, commanding voice elicited a look of utter contempt from the dog and sympathy from passerby who were surreptitiously googling "animal abuse hotline" on their smart phones.

Training her to use her crate as a "safe place" went equally well.  Throw in some treats, they all said.  Get her comfortable with the door open, then close it and she'll be in "home sweet home" and happy as a clam.  Snort (I don't know how to write this sound, but it is the only one I can think of to adequately describe my reaction to this faulty bit of reasoning).

I threw in her favorite treats.  Chloe, who will eat leaves, the carpet pad and rabbit poo as though they were the latest offerings of a five-star master chef, looked at me like: I hope you don't think I'm going in after that because I know it is a trap.  Not only am I cuter than you, I am also waay smarter.

Alternatively, she would approach the crate as though it held a rabid rattler, brace her back feet against the open door and stretch her neck as though she was that slinky dog to grab the treat and then run like crazy with her prize as far as she could go.

As far as using treats to train her to follow simple commands?  Yeah.  That went great...as long as we were in the privacy of our own home where no one could observe her caving in and actually doing something I said.  Oh, and as long as I had a fist full of treats.

First we worked on sit.  Sit.  Treat.  Sit.  Treat.  By day two, she would see the treat bag and automatically sit before I could say anything.  I guess I was too slow with the treats, so she figured she'd just cut to the chase.

By week five, she knew sit, down, stay, heel, off, out and leave it.  If she even suspected I might possibly have a treat, she would run through the list like an olympic athlete sprinting for the finish line.  She would flip, flop, hop, skip, jump and then throw herself down before I could even clear my throat.  She seemed to think that since she had done it all, I should just dump the whole pile of treats all at once and stop wasting both our time.

Take her outside and give her the same commands? Not only did I have to show her the treat, I had to offer it up for approval before she would consider entertaining my request.  Sit?  For a carrot?  Whaddya have rocks in your head mom?  I will sit, but I want a hot dog or at least some chicken.  I also don't feel like staying, unless you want me to walk, in which case, I will be happy to jump up and down in a complete frenzy before throwing myself in the middle of the road and then rolling over on my back and going limp when you try to pick me up.

And so we got a trainer.

Sit, said the trainer, and she sat.

Heel, said the trainer, and she heeled.

Walk, said the trainer, and she walked.

Then we went home.

Sit, I said.  She rolled her eyes.

Heel, I said.  She sat.

Walk, I said. 

Look, she said, you are not the trainer, so get it out of your head that I'm going to listen to you.  Unless you have something really, really tasty for me.  Now, where did you put those hot dogs?

Happy Birthday (Or How I Got Out of Cooking Breakfast Ever Again)

Long ago and not so far away, I decided to surprise Tim for his birthday by bringing him breakfast in bed...and I have been banned from making breakfast ever since. (hehehe)

It was his first birthday after we had gotten married, and I wanted it to be special, so I racked my brain for ideas. A rose petal strewn coverlet? Chilled champagne and strawberries? A candlelit dinner with softly playing violins in the background? A little something secret from Victoria's? Scrambled eggs in a toast cup? Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner!

I mean, really, what says I love you more than "the incredible, edible egg" floating in a toasted cup made of Wonder Bread? It just screams romance and celebration.

So I got up early, snuck out into the kitchen and transformed into a cross between Martha Stewart and the Barefoot Contessa. I mixed and cut and buttered and stirred, until I had produced a feast fit for a king, served up in such a way that the Iron Chefs would have been gnashing their teeth out of jealousy.

Setting my creation on the tray complete with artfully folded napkin ( I had mastered the difficult triangle shape in preparation for the big day), I breezed into the bedroom and set the meal before my victim, er, love of my life with a flourish.

"Um, what is this?" I remember Tim peering down at the tray, poking the food gingerly with his fork as though it might poke back.

"Breakfast," I informed him, pleased with my creative use of breakfast food and a muffin tin. Had the Food Network been around then, I felt sure they would have come knocking at my door. Maybe not.

"I know it's supposed to be breakfast," Tim jabbed at it again, a little harder this time, and watched closely for any signs of aggression. "But what is it actually made from? Anything I might recognize?"

"It's a scrambled egg in a nest.". This was not going quite as I had envisioned it.

In my scenario, Tim was supposed to be scarfing down the sumptuous repast I had lovingly slaved over while gazing at me adoringly. Instead, he was shrinking back away from the plate as though it contained some sort of mutant creature that might suddenly lunge for his throat at any moment, while eyeing me suspiciously as though he suspected I may have taken out a really large life insurance policy on him.

"No, really. What did you do to the, um, okay, we'll call it an egg?" Tim apparently decided I had sufficiently wounded it to the point where he could safely gather some of it up on his fork. Although he did hold it at arms length just to be on the safe side. "Is it cooked?"

"No. I served you a raw egg." Birthday or not, there was only so much I could take. Hmm, maybe Vickey's would have been a safer choice. I mean, would he actually have said, "Black? Lace? Really? What were you thinking?"

"Well, it just looks a little...undercooked. And what is this cup made of?". He banged the side of my cute little toast cup with the knife like he was kicking the tire of a used car he suspected might break down after he drove it five feet.

Note to self: next year, go with the rose petals, because apparently he would find them more appetizing than my current offering. At least he wouldn't be looking at them as though they might do him some bodily harm.

"For your information, the eggs are cooked perfectly. They are not supposed to resemble a rubber product from the Acme gag gift catalogue, which is how you apparently like them. And I'll thank you to stop chipping away at the toast as though you were trying to tunnel your way out of Sing-Sing."

"Okay. Okay. I was just saying..." Tim took a deep breath and gamely shoveled a forkful into his mouth...and then gagged. "Nope. Can't do it, " he gasped, reaching for the juice and downing it as though it was the last vial of anti-venom on the planet.

"Fine." I grabbed the tray. "That's the last time I'm making you breakfast."

"Can I have that in writing?" he called after me as he scrambled out of bed and rushed into the bathroom for his toothbrush, paste, Listerine, Scope and Clorox. "Seriously. I'm not saying that just to be nice."

And so, this morning, for his birthday, I gave him the gift he wanted more than anything...no breakfast.

And we all lived happily ever after.

Missing!

I always tell Tim that if I die first, he will have to sell the house 'as is' because he knows where NOTHING is.

"Do we have band-aids? a heating pad? extra guest towels?  tape? scissors?  toilet paper?  the check book?  my cell phone?  milk?"

Seriously, if it can't jump up and down, waving a flag and screaming "Here I am! Here I am!" while a big neon arrow hangs above it, he can't find it.

I have seen the man literally stand in front of an open fridge telling me we don't have any butter when there are four pounds of it staring back at him.

"Oh.  Well.  How was I supposed to see it behind the yogurt?"

 Yeah.  I can see where that would be a problem what with the clear glass shelves, and also because the butter has only been kept there since, hmm. let me think, FOREVER!

At least when I can't find something, there is a very good reason for it...it's because I have put it someplace  so safe that no one, including me, would think to look for it there.

Most recent case in point:  a phone number on a post-it.

I was given the number late on a Friday afternoon about two weeks ago and I stuffed it into my purse among the eighty-six thousand old dry cleaning tickets, thirty-nine dozen empty Halloween candy wrappers, one hundred pens (only two of which actually work), fifty stubs of old eye/lip pencils, assorted flip-flops (for pedicures), twenty-six pounds of change all in pennies and nickels, and twelve million dollars worth of twenty percent off coupons for Bed Bath and Beyond from 2006 that I habitually carry.

At some point on Saturday, I got the oh so brilliant idea to put the post-it someplace safe, so that I could actually find it to call first thing Monday morning.  And that is the last time I saw that post-it.

I spent days looking for the crummy little thing.  I looked in all the usual places like the office, my bedside table, jewelry box, and bathroom counter.  I looked in less likely places, hoping to shift the blame for losing it, like Tim's bedside table, Tim's dresser, Tim's "basket o' crap" (which is the male equivalent to my purse) in the TV room.  No post-it.  It had vanished into thin air.

I played a few rounds of the "If I were a post-it,where would I be?" game and the "If I were going to put something in a really safe place, where would it be?" game, but I was so bad at both of them I didn't even get the consolation prize of a years supply of Rice-a- Roni, let alone my post-it.

Finally, after opening the same drawers/cupboards/doors for the thousandth time in the mad, hope that the stupid post-it would have magically appeared, I had to give up, call the person who gave me the number, admit that I was losing my mind and/or stupid, and ask for the number again.  Ugh.

And the thing is, I just know, based on past experience that that lousy post-it will show up when and where I least expect it.  One day, I will open the freezer, or decide to organize the garage and there it will be, mocking me, like the cup of coffee I lost awhile back.

One minute, I had the cup in my hands, the next, I had no idea where I left it.  We were getting ready to go out, so I couldn't mount a full scale search and rescue mission, but I did try to retrace my steps and even made slurping noises, calling, "Here coffee, coffee," but to no avail.  My coffee was nowhere to be found.

About a week later, Tim opened the hall closet to get something out and emerged with a coffee cup and a funny look on his face. 

"Remember that coffee you lost?" he asked, holding it at arms length as though it were a poisonous snake or ticking time bomb.  "I think I just found it...or what used to be it.  Now, it's more like a science experiment gone bad."

Eww.  Well, that's one way to kick the coffee habit.

But my all-time best (worst?) was years and years ago (which I unfortunately couldn't blame on age, like I do now), and involved a ring.

This was the first really "nice" piece of jewelry Tim had given me, and I was sooo careful with it.  Right up to the moment I lost it.

I had packed it in our bags to go to Pennsylvania for Easter, and when we got there, the ring was gone.

I blamed the airline employees, sure that it had been stolen, but  Tim pointed out that since we had driven ourselves, that was unlikely.

All through Easter, I checked and rechecked our bags.  I fretted, fumed and worried, anxious to get home.  Finally, the holiday came to an end, we drove home, and I barely waited for Tim to slow down before I was out of the car, making a beeline for our apartment.

No ring.  I looked high and low and everywhere in between.  No ring.  I ripped apart every drawer in the place.  I searched old suitcases, purses and toiletry kits.  No ring.

"Pray to Saint Anthony," my mother advised, nodding sagely.  "It always works for me.

I prayed.  No ring.  I prayed harder, but he must have been helping my mother find all the things she lost (a full-time job even for a saint), because I still couldn't find that darn ring.

"Put it out of your mind,"  Tim told me.  "If you don't think about it, you'll remember what you did with it."

Good plan, general.  Except for one tiny little flaw.  Not thinking was clearly how I got into this mess in the first place!!!  Got a plan B you'd like to share?

Days turned to weeks, weeks to months and then one day, I took down a box from the tippy-top closet shelf where I kept mementos, opened it to put something in and...there was the ring!

To this day, I still have no idea how it came to be in that box.  I suspect elves.  Or maybe fairies.  Hmmm. Possibly a poltergeist.  Because I know I couldn't possibly have put it there.  I would have put it someplace "safe".

Gremlins

Years ago, I had a car that had gremlins running around inside it.  We'd be driving along, listening to the radio, when all of a sudden, the station would change, usually to something that made you want to drive over the edge of a cliff, like talk radio where the topic was "Foot Fungus:  Friend or Foe" or the Lawrence Welk channel with special guest Hans the goat boy and his magic accordion.

No matter what buttons or pushed, or how hard you pushed them, the station would not change until those gremlins were good and ready to change it.  Oh, and bonus!  You couldn't turn the radio off either, so there was pretty much nothing you could do but slap both hands over your ears, drive with your elbows and knees and chant, "lalalalala, I can't hear you," until the station was switched back to something resembling modern music.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the doors would randomly lock and unlock.  Running errands?  Lock.  Lost in a dicey section of town?  Unlock.  Driving down the highway?  Lock, unlock, lock, unlock.  Getting gas?  Lock.  On Tim.  While he was pumping gas.  With the keys inside.

And that was the end of that car.

Now, we apparently have some of those same gremlins running around our house.

Last week, I was watching TV as the dog snoozed behind the couch when, all of a sudden, one of the smoke detectors upstairs gave one long, loud beeeep, and one of the lights above the stairwell started flashing on and off, on and off.

Jumping up, I ran over to the stairs, only to find...nothing.  No smoke, no fire.  No reason why the lights should be flickering like in one of those horror movies where you're shouting, "Run, dummy, run!" to the ditsy girl who simply has to check it out when she knows full well that there is a revenge-seeking, mask-wearing, axe murderer on the loose and so far, nine out of her ten friends have been gruesomely killed in that same stairwell.

I turned the light off, then back on.  Still flickering, but the other light on the switch was completely dead.  I quickly checked the date.  Nope.  Not Friday the 13th.  Whew.  I pressed the switch again.  Same result.  I double checked our address.  Okay, we did not live on Elm street.  I went to the alarm panel.  No alarm had registered.  Hmmm.  Curiouser and curiouser.

Suddenly, the dog went on high alert.  Oh no, was it Freddy, Mike Meyers, Chucky or Dracula???  Nope.  It was only Tim, no axe in sight, coming home from a dinner, and Chloe happily tripped over to welcome him.

I related the bizarre incident to Tim, and he also pushed the button (both lights were now dead), checked the alarm, looked under the bed, in the closet, behind the door, and shrugged, concluding that maybe we'd had a power surge or something.  Meanwhile, I slept with one eye open that night, just in case.

Two days later, the gremlins struck again.

We had a friend over with her dog, and the three of us were laughing as we sat in the basement watching the dogs tumble around the floor.  Suddenly, the alarm went off again.  This time, it really went off, beeeeeeeppp!!!  Tim ran upstairs to disarm it while I assured our friend that it was just our friendly little gremlin and it was not really a fire...probably.  Maybe.  Hopefully.

A few minutes later, the front doorbell rang.  Assuming Tim would get it, I didn't bother to go upstairs, and kept chatting.  About five or so minutes later, Tim appeared downstairs again. 

"You really should answer the doorbell when it rings," he warned me.

"Didn't you get it?" I asked, raising a brow, because surely, he hadn't expected me to run up the stairs when he was, what, twenty feet from the door?  Who was he, Archie Bunker?

"I was at the store," he informed me.  "I went to get batteries for the smoke detector, since I thought changing the batteries might solve the problem."

Confused, I followed him up the stairs.  "Then how do you know the bell rang?  Was it you?  Did you forget your key?  Why wouldn't you call?  And anyway, you're in, so what's the big deal?"  The final words died on my lips as I saw the armed police officers standing in the kitchen.

Crap.  Had the house actually been on fire or broken into?  Did they have Chucky cuffed in the back of the cruiser?  Was Freddy's blood splattered all over my living room walls?  What had I missed???

And shouldn't the dog have heard something and  barked?  Lassie had always barked to warn Timmy just before the dope fell into the well...again.  Couldn't Chloe have at least growled, sneezed or even burped to let me know my life was about to be snuffed out?

I glanced down at the adorable muppet at my feet who was doing her doggie best to smother the officers with kisses and hugs.

"Way to go Chloe," I congratulated her.  "Next time, maybe you can lead the axe-wielding psychopath to the silver before he kills us."

The police assured me though that we actually had not been in danger.  Apparently, the alarm had  come from the "panic" button on one of the key fobs, so they had raced over, assuming the worst.

Tim had arrived back home to find lights flashing and guns drawn, and assumed the worst.

Meanwhile, our gremlin was having the last laugh, since, at the time the alarm went off, we were all downstairs and our keys were on the hall table, upstairs.  Hmmm. I wonder if we can trade in our house like we did the car?

You Want Me To Do What ?

Graceful, I am not.  Not even close.  In fact, anything that requires more than a minimal amount of coordination is totally beyond my abilities, like, say, walking and chewing gum, or talking and working out.

After watching me try (and fail) for the umpteenth time to complete an exercise as she had demonstrated it, my trainer asked me if I would ever consider being on Dancing With The Stars . (If I were a celebrity, a quasi-celebrity, or someone who had more than five hits on You Tube.)

I started to answer, then realized what she had really meant was:  Would you do it, knowing that you would be voted off before the first episode even aired?

For three years, Jess has come twice a week to torture, er, I mean train me, and I still can't follow basic moves.

"Okay, you're going to take a weight in each hand, stand like this and move your arms like this," she will demonstrate, raising her arms up from the side above her head, rotating her wrists and bringing her arms down in front of her, as I mimic her in the mirror sans weights.

"Got it," I always claim, taking the weights from her, both of us knowing full well that it will take at least fifty or sixty reps before I can do anything even close to what she did.

"Okay," she'll stop me, "you're inventing a new exercise again that is working out your toenails, and we were going after shoulders and arms.  Watch."  And she will repeat the exercise.

"Wasn't I doing that?"  I'll ask, and sadly I am not faking it in order to get out of doing all fifty thousand reps she has decided is necessary to suck the joy out of my life.

"No, you were doing this," and she'll flail her arms around in a move that is a cross between the chicken dance and that bird pose the Karate Kid did.

"Oh.  There's a difference?"

Heaven forbid, she tries to give me a multi-step routine.

"First," she'll say, "you're going to do forward lunges, holding weights, then backward lunges, then jump squats with a push-up in between, and finally side lunges with a squat."

"Huh?  Wait. What came after you said first?"

And if something interesting comes on the TV or I decide to try and talk at the same time I'm doing a crunch while holding a medicine ball (well, okay, I am always talking)?  Pffft.  I might as well be trying to calculate the amount of thrust needed to lift Shamu into outer space using a hand-held fan and a go-cart engine.  I mean, c'mon.  I'm supposed to remember whether or not to raise bent knees or keep them straight as I simultaneously hoist the equivalent of a small child over my head and sit up while keeping up to date on Lindsay Lohan?  Never gonna happen.

None of this is new to Jess.  She knows that I will forget to bend my back knee in a lunge, lose count of the reps by the time I hit five and confuse a squat thrust with a push-up jump-out thingy.  After all, we've only done them five million times.

The dog trainer is learning all of this the hard way.  Come to think of it, so is the dog.  She had gotten pretty agile from dodging my two left feet.

"Get her in front of you, then step back with your left foot while bringing your left arm back, then forward, so Chloe follows the treat and 'heels'," the trainer showed me the routine...sixteen times.

"That was a good try," she encouraged me, while at the same time keeping the poor dog from being garroted by the leash.

"Watch again," and she performed the maneuver flawlessly.

Little did she realize that she could do it four thousand more times and I would still believe that I was matching her moves exactly instead of looking like I was reeling in a 200 pound fish who wasn't going down without a fight.

"You're actually pulling her around," she gently took the lead away from me after several more failed attempts, when the dog gave her a look that said,"Help me!"  "Maybe you should practice without the lead."

Maybe she should realize that moving my leg and arm at the same time while guiding the dog and offering a treat was beyond my capabilities.

"Let's go out in the other room, I'll bring in my dog and you can 1. let Chloe greet her, 2. call Chloe away, 3. back up towards the door, 4. get her in front of you and 5. make her heel."

Sure.  No problem.  And then I'll perform Swan Lake.  Did you miss the part where I got tangled in the lead taking one step back?

"Oh, and remember to use your voice to indicate good from bad actions on her part."

Really?  You're going to add yet another thing?  Even the dog looked at her skeptically.

Eventually, she, like Jess, ended up rolling her eyes and accepting the fact that not only am I in no danger of ever winning America's Got Talent  I am in no danger of being able to walk down the street without  tripping over my own feet. 

Now all I have to do is wait for them to stop trying to change that, and let me go back to being clumsy and lazy.

Shedding Some Light on Things

A few days ago we were changing a light bulb in the ceiling when it dropped on the ground and broke.  And so began the saga.

First of all, it was one of those new, corkscrew bulbs, which I vaguely remembered hearing contained something dangerous, but bought because they were all I could find at the time.  "Don't break them, ever, because it's really, really bad" was the gist of some story I saw on one of those news shows with a number in the title.  Since I kind of make it a rule to never purposely smash new light bulbs, I guess I didn't pay as much attention as I should have to the story.

So now, with visions of hazmat teams dancing through my head, I grabbed the box and scanned it for some helpful advice, or at least a skull and crossbones symbol.  Despite the tons of teeny, tiny writing, there was nothing on the box to indicate that we should be at defcon 10, so Tim began to sweep up the mess.

Unable to ignore the queasy feeling in my stomach, I grabbed my ipad and googled the bulbs.  I mean, why did the news story I remembered promise consequences like growing an extra toe, sprouting purple hair out of my naval, or glowing in the dark if it was no big deal  to break a bulb?  Meanwhile, Tim hauled out the vacuum.

One or two searches later, I found what I was looking for...Danger! Danger! One website screamed at me.  Handle these bulbs with the utmost caution because they contain mercury.  However, it went on, if you are truly stupid enough to ever break one, here is what you must NEVER do:

1.  Sweep it up
2.  Vacuum it up.

Goodie, we were two for two.  I could feel that third eye trying to sprout, and was Tim looking a little iridescent?

3. Do not place in the garbage.

I glanced over at Tim.  Oops.  Too late on that one as well.  Three for three.  Lucky us.  We should play the lotto.  I continued reading, hoping for at least a small ray of light that wasn't nuclear at the end of the tunnel.

4. Open all the windows and leave the premises for fifteen minutes.

I checked my watch.  More good news.  We had about two minutes left of the fifteen.

Deciding I didn't want to know that we should have run screaming into the night and not returned without gas masks, protective eye wear and a rubber suit, I closed my ipad, picked up my now five-legged dog and swore I would never buy those bulbs again.

The next day, I went to Home Depot, grabbed the biggest shopping cart I could find and headed for the light bulb aisle.  Not wanting to make yet another unfortunate choice, I asked the first guy I saw for help, outlining the whole pitiful story.

He tried to sell me a new kitchen.

When I insisted that all I was interested in was light bulbs, he reluctantly went off to get someone who specialized in that area.  Okaaaay.

Turns out the guy he called must have dropped out of Light Bulb U, because he had to call someone else as soon as I mentioned the word dimmable.  The next guy was apparently no Rhodes scholar either, because he grabbed the nearest bulb and shoved it at me with a definite 'deer in the headlights' look.

Meanwhile, the first guy came back and said, "You're not buying those are you?  They're too cheap.  You should buy some good ones."

Excuse me?  Um.  You had your chance, and palmed me off on dumb and dumber who told me to get these.

"Have you gone to Walmart or Cosco?" he pressed.  "That's where I buy mine."

I looked around for the hidden camera.

"No, really," he continued, "and if you can't change the bulbs, don't just buy more, I'll come over and do it for you."

Okay.  So now you've gone from odd to creepy, all in one easy step.

"I think my husband and I can handle it." I began to sidle away, looking for the lighting expert, or even the guy with a PhD in plungers to help me make a clean getaway.

"Well, you're not supposed to drop the bulbs," he countered.

Really??!! Wow.  I wish somebody had told me that years ago.  Imagine.  I've been doing it wrong all this time.  So you're saying that when I take it out of the box, I'm not supposed to throw the bulb on the floor before screwing it in?

I escaped to the Christmas aisle, hoping to lose him in the maze of pre-lit trees before he could open his mouth again and either tick me off or creep me out.

As I peeked around the corner to see if the coast was clear and I could make it to the check-out without an offer to swap out the batteries in my smoke detectors, a third guy approached to offer help.  What was it, a slow day at Home Depot?

"I see you've got a lot of light bulbs there," he motioned to my over-filled cart (I wasn't kidding when I said I would never use those new bulbs again). "We have some better ones than that.  Here, I'll show you."

Gee thanks.  Where were you five minutes ago when I needed you?

He then proceeded to give me an in-depth analysis of every light bulb they carried and a one-on-one comparison of brands, sizes, voltages, wattage, and type of light emitted.  I learned about how the old bulbs are being phased out and the time schedule for phasing in the new type.  This was not only a 'specialist', this was a true 'expert'.  Maybe even a professor, like on Gilligan's Island .  Wow. 

I stayed with him through the BR30 vs BR40 lecture, but drifted off somewhere between learning that IKEA makes lamps that will only use their bulbs and how much jail time you'll have to do if you are caught selling the 'old' bulbs after a certain date.

Just as I was contemplating 'accidentally' smashing a few dozen bulbs as a distraction so I could escape, another poor, unfortunate soul approached with a question.

I was able to make a clean getaway before I had to listen to 'The Complete History of the Light Bulb' in French, and made a solemn vow to myself to order bulbs online from now on.

It's All About the Fit

This past weekend, we had some friends visit from Texas.  As we showed them out "new" house, they admired a pair of loveseats on the third floor.  I explained that they were our former living room couches, just recovered.  And what a nightmare that was.

When we moved in, I had the movers put them up in the guest room at the top of the house.  Lickety-split, up they went.  No problem.

About a year or so later, I had the reupholster guys come to take them out.  No lickety.  No split.  Many problems.

Wham!  They smashed the first one of the couches into the door frame as they attempted to get it through the door.

Um.  I'd actually like it back in one piece, if it wouldn't be too much trouble.

Bam!  They smashed it a second time as they backed up and tried again.

Hey, Braveheart.  That's a couch, not a battering ram.

Slam!  Okay.  Three times is obviously not the charm.  Let's review some basic physics here...two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.  C'mon, say it with me.

"This couch won't fit through here," lead guy one complained.  "What'd ya do, put these couches up here, then finish building?"

Why, yes.  How clever of you to have figured it out.  I actually designed the entire house around these fifteen year old, worn and stained couches.  It's the newest craze.  I hear Brad and Angelina have done it in at least three of their homes.

"Well, the legs must come off then," he grumbled.

"I don't think so...but how about tipping it the other way?" I offered.

"I've been doing this a long time, and the legs always come off," he informed me loftily.

Okaaayyy...

Fifteen minutes later, he was back to trying to cram the couch through the door...with the legs still on.  He had, however, removed the door from its hinges.

"How about tipping it the other way?" I suggested again.

"There is no way you got these couches through this door," he huffed after about fifty-six more failed attempts to jam it through, all the while ignoring my suggestion.

And yet, there they are, in the room.  Ooh.  It must have been magic.  Maybe the movers were just better at spells and potions than you.  Perhaps your wand needs the new 10.5 upgrade.  Oh, and incidentally, I believe there is a tiny speck of paint that you missed when removing it all from the door frame, but don't worry, I'm sure you'll get it on your next attempt to force the couch through.

"How about tipping it the other way," guy two suggested at this point, correctly interpreting my narrowed eyes, crossed arms and tapping foot as danger sings.

"That won't help," guy one groused, oblivious to the act that he was wasting the last minutes of his life complaining.  "These couches just won't fit."

"Then maybe I should call someone else," I cut off his grumbling.

Suddenly, divine inspiration hit.

"Hey.  I know.  Let's tip the couch this way," guy one suggested.

Guy two shot guy one a look that was only slightly less malevolent than the one I was aiming at him.

One hour, four gallons of sweat, 372 curses and various scratches, dents and bruises later, the couches were loaded into the truck.

About two weeks later, a different crew brought my now, oh so pretty couches back.

Wham!  Uh oh.  They had sent  Laurel and Hardy clones...again.

"These couches aren't going to fit through this door," new guy one determined.

"They fit through before, you just need to tip them the other way,"  I told him, glad the couches were at least protected by plastic.

"Are you sure they went here?"  he questioned.

Hmm.  Let's see.  Maybe I'm mistaken as to which room I put them in.  Let me think.  By golly, you're right.  I actually had them in the kitchen for the last year.  Oh, no, wait a minute.  They were in the bathroom.  That's right.  One was in the tub and the other one was in front of the sink.  Whew.  Glad you said something.  Just think how odd they would look in a sitting area.

Heaving a pained sigh, new guy one and new guy two hefted the couch and tried again.  And again.  And again, still ignoring my advice on tipping the couch.

"Maybe try turning it the other way," I tried one last time when my door frame began to resemble Swiss cheese.  I began wishing the doorway was hooked up to a buzzer like in the game Operation except instead of just getting buzzed, maybe a nice little electric shock.  Say something around fifty or sixty thousand volts.

"The plastic is making it too thick," new guy one decided ripping it off.  "That's the problem."

Yeah, I can understand how that extra tenth of a millimeter makes all the difference.  Not.  Turn. It. The. Other. Way.

Wham! Bam! Slam!

"When they reupholstered, they must have added more stuffing," he was clutching at invisible straws now...and his chest, his side and one knee.

"So, does this mean you can't get it through?"  I asked, silently daring him to tell me it was impossible.

"There's no way they are going to fit," he prepared to head back down the stairs, foolish, foolish man that he was.

"So what do you suggest I do with the couches?'  Because I'm getting some really good ideas on where you can place them.

"How about another room?"

"How about you take them back, restore them to their former state and give me my money back?" 

Once again, divine inspiration.

"Let's tip it this way," new guy one finally saw the light and tipped the couches.

And so, the couches are happily resting on the third floor.  But I've decided that when we eventually move, they are going to convey.

We Don't Do Windows

I have finally found someone worse than all those repair people who give you that infamous "window" as though you have nothing better to do than be at their beck and call.  Service people who won't even give you a day much less a window as though you have nothing to do at all.

Last spring, after a lot of storms and high winds, we needed to have some trees removed.  After doing some research, I contacted a company that had good ratings, and asked them for an estimate.  They told me they would look at the schedule and get back to me with a time and day shortly.

Now to me, shortly means later that day, maybe the next day.  To them, it meant anywhere from that moment until the end of time.  So, two days later, I checked in and asked if they were still interested in giving an estimate.

Huh?  Estimate?  Oh.  Yeah.  Um.  How about next Monday?

Okay.  Can you give me a time frame?

Uh. Hmmm.  Time frame?

Yeah.  You know.  Time frame.  A span of time anywhere from four to sixteen hours when I will sit home twiddling my thumbs and then you show up at the last possible second if you bother to come at all.

We'll have to get back to you on that later.

Later?  Let's see.  To you, shortly means what, a year or two, so later must mean...I give up.  The twelfth of never?

Two days later...still no time frame.  So I contacted them again explaining that while, in their own, twisted little universe they were more important than air, the rest of us peasants actually had something called a life.   At least the phone/cable/heating/appliance repair people had the decency to pretend that they cared about me by going through the motions of scheduling a window, but these tree people couldn't even be bothered to do that much.  I mean, it's not like I expected them to actually stick to what they told me.  So, how about it?  Morning, afternoon, evening?  Pick one.

Oh.  I wanted a time frame on Monday? 

Okay.  Do me a favor.  Get a co-worker to stick a mirror under your nose to see if you are still breathing because I suspect you may be brain dead.

But Monday was a whole two days away.  Did I really need a time frame now?

No.  Why don't you wait until Sunday night at 11:59 to give me a time frame, because I would really enjoy trying to arrange my schedule at the last second.  Challenges like that are what makes life worth living, don't you think?

Needless to say, I went with another company. 

I would like to think that this was an anomaly, but the other day, I ran into the same thing all over again.  This time, it was a guy from the gas company.

We decided this summer, after losing our power for the the kajillionth time, to get a generator.  Because Tim has to have one that could power a small village, the Empire State Building and The Mall of America all at the same time, we needed a new gas meter.

Okay, when can you do it?

How about Wednesday?

Fine.  When on Wednesday?

I'll have to call you back.

Seriously?  C'mon.  It's Monday.  How hard is it to schedule something less than two days away?  I'm not asking for a lifetime commitment, just a vague idea of when you think you might feel like dropping by.

I'm not sure of my schedule.  I'll have to let you know tomorrow.

Super.  Don't worry about me.  I only have places to go and things to do, but hey, I wouldn't want to make you commit to something before you're sure.

The next day, he called back with a two hour window for the following day.

Yippee!!  A two hour window.  Unheard of.  He was my new hero...until he didn't show up.

After two and a half hours, I called and asked how late was he running?
 
Oh. It's not me.  It's, um, let's see, who is it?

Gee, I'm on the edge of my seat.  Who is it?

It's Mike.  Yeah.  He got held up waiting for a part on a job.  I don't think he's going to get there today.  Wait.  Who'd you say you were again?  Morgan?

Bit your tongue.  Bite your tongue.  There is only one gas company, and you need this, I told myself even as I pictured eviscerating him, or at the very least slapping him silly.

No.  Sinclair. 

Sinclair.  You're not on the schedule today.  No. I have you for tomorrow.  Did I tell you today?

It's enough to make you long for the good old sixteen hour window.

I'm Late! I'm Late! I'm Late!

My parents came to visit this weekend on their way down to Florida, and it was like spending time with the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.

First of all, this was the first time they were taking the auto train from here to Florida, and my father had been reading about it on the Amtrak website. I am sooo glad we taught him to surf the net. Next time we have a brilliant idea like that, we should just slam our hands in a door repeatedly. It would be less painful.

"It says you can check in as early as 11:30," he started in on Saturday about fifteen minutes after they arrived.

"But the train doesn't leave until 4...on Monday,". I pointed out. "Why do you want to sit around the station for several hours?"

"I want to make sure we get the 7pm seating for dinner," he informed me, "otherwise, we'll be stuck eating at either 5 or 9."

"So it's first come, first serve?"

"I don't know, but I want to be there early, so we get the 7pm seating for dinner."

Okay. Got it. You want to eat at 7.

"I really want to get there early," he broached the subject again about an hour later. "5pm is too early to eat and 9 is too late."

"What time do they board?". Tim tried a different tack.

"2pm, but I want to make sure we get the 7 o'clock dinner seating," my father stressed.

"So you reserve dinner when you check in?" Tim tried again to clarify.

"I don't know, but 5 is too early and 9 is too late for dinner," said the rainman, er, my father.

"That's a long time to sit in the station," sometimes Tim didn't have the sense God gave a turnip.

Stop. Roll over and play dead. Give up. I tried to communicate telepathically with Tim, but had no more success getting him to listen to me that way than I have when I actually speak out loud to him.

"I'd go around 1," he offered, "otherwise, it'll be a really long day."

"I don't know," my father seemed to waver for a moment, but recovered. "I'd hate to get there too late to get the 7 o'clock seating."

He actually managed to not bring up the subject for at least another hour or two and then only 86 or 87 times more an hour for the next two days.

Each time, we tried to lure him off topic by steering the conversation toward some other aspect of the journey.

"So, does arriving early affect the order in which your car comes off the train at the end?"

"It says it doesn't because of the way they load them on, but it does affect whether you get the 7pm seating."

Shoot me.

"Do you want to order a Netflix movie so you can watch it on your iPad? They have wi-fi on board, right?"

"If we get the 7pm seating, we won't have time for a movie afterwards, so we'll just watch a TV show. That's why I want to get there early."

Shoot me now.

"What do they serve for dinner anyway?"

"I don't know. I couldn't find that on the website, but it says they have three seatings: 5, 7, or 9."

Okay, one bullet for the both of us. We'll stand really, really close.

And while my father was obsessed with getting to the train early on Monday, my mother was just as obsessed with getting to church early on Sunday.

"What time is mass?" she questioned on Saturday night.

"All different times. Sleep as late as you want, and we'll go from there," I told her.

She was up at 7.

"What's the mass schedule?" she wanted to know. "What time do we have to leave? I don't want to be late."

We decided on 10:30 mass at a church less than five minutes away. Rose offered to drive, so at 10:10, my mother decided that Rose was late and she would wait outside for her.

"It's kind of breezy and chilly," I warned, "why don't we just watch out the window?"

"She might park the car and get out before we can get to the door, and then we'll be really late."

Okay, you and dad need to get either a hobby or a prescription for an incredibly powerful drug.

"It's 10:17," she fretted as we stood at the bottom of the driveway getting blown apart. "I don't want to be late."

"I know, but the church is less than five minute away," I tried to soothe her.

"It's 10:20, we're going to be late," she pronounced exactly three minutes later.

Maybe a hobby and a drug.

"It's 10:22. We'll never make it on time."

Hobby, drug and smash the watch.

Fortunately, Rose arrived at 10:25, just as I was getting ready to perform CPR...on myself because my blood pressure shot up sixty points every time Big Ben ticked off another second.

I am happy to say that my mother was not late...much.

I wish I could say the same for my father. Sadly, by the time he stopped for gas on the way to the train, he was late. They were stuck with the dreaded 5pm dinner slot.

"I told you so," he pouted over the phone. "I knew I should have been here early. Now, we'll have too much time to kill just sitting around after dinner."

As opposed to the time sitting around before? I wanted to, but I didn't say it.

Hobby, drug, gun, one bullet.

Love Is A Battlefield

This past weekend, our nephew got married, and like most weddings, family members gathered together to celebrate...and aggravate.

The first skirmish occurred during the rehearsal dinner when a relative of the bride came up to our happy little family group as we were sitting down to dinner.  Trying to make conversation, but inadvertently making enemies with every syllable he uttered, he asked one of Tim's sisters where she fit in the order of the siblings.

"I'm the oldest of the girls," she told him.

"Ahh, but you look like the youngest," he replied gallantly, but unfortunately within hearing of Rose who was across the table.

"Helloooo.  I'm sitting right here," Rose all but growled under her breath while the rest of us snickered.

Oblivious to the daggers Rose was shooting him with her eyes, he continued to dig himself deeper into the hole.

"So how old are your brothers?" he pressed.

"Tim and Tom are celebrating a milestone birthday this year,"  And she named a number I refuse to write because if I see a number that large associated with me in print, I may pass out.

"Really?!!?"  he had the nerve and misfortune to look surprised.  "That's all?  I am ten years older and I thought they were my age.  They are the youngest?"

Uh oh.  Tim's eyes narrowed, while Rose's crossed with the effort it took not to leap across the table and show him who was old.  We all sucked in a collective breath and tried to unobtrusively back away to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.

I don't know what he had done with the money his mother had given him for charm lessons, but I hoped he had invested wisely.  He was going to need a lot of cash to pay the medical bills.

"I don't even dye my hair," he boasted, smoothing back the thinning strands.

"That's what we all say,"  Rose countered with a saccharine sweet smile, fluffing her own blond locks, while Tim sniped, "Yeah.  And the sky is green and the grass is blue," out of the corner of his mouth to me, while I kicked him under the table, hard.

Still not feeling the waves of hostility surging toward him, he continued, "I am the best looking.  See," he pointed across the room, "my one brother is grey and the other is bald."

"Maybe you're adopted," Rose offered, batting her eyelashes at him while preparing to go in for the kill.

Meanwhile, I kicked Tim harder to prevent him from entering the fray.  He subsided with a glare and a muttered, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall..."

"No.  Really.  I, too am the oldest and the best looking," he beamed at Tim's oldest sister, who, knowing he was a dead man walking leaned back while Rose finished him off.

"Well, we can't all be George Clooney," she declared.  As he opened his mouth again, she cut him off.  "One more word and it's off with your head, undyed hair and all."

The foolish man actually laughed, but finally had the good sense to retreat before he was carried, bleeding off the field.

Of course, this exchange was mild compared to the one that took place the day of our rehearsal dinner, oh so many years ago.

It had been a crazy day, filled with a thousand last minute details that needed to be taken care of, but finally it was time to get dressed for dinner.

Since it was ninety-five degrees out, and we were expecting my cousin and her fiance from out of town at any minute, my mother had turned on all three of the air conditioners in the bedrooms.  The only problem was that in our hundred plus year old house, the electrical system could only handle two and a half air conditioners when all the planets lined up and the moon was in the seventh house.

We turned on a light, we blew a fuse.  Plugged in a curling iron, we blew a fuse.  Opened the fridge, we blew a fuse.  Lit a match, we blew a fuse.

And each time this happened, my father would stomp down to the cellar to do battle with the fuse box, cursing a blue streak.  As for the rest of us, this was not our fight, since A. my father was the only one who knew how to do this, and B.  he was the only one brave enough to actually go down there without a silver bullet, string of garlic, bucket of holy water, ghostbuster, exorcist, or team of green berets.

Our cellar made the Amityville Horror house look like a suite at the Ritz.  Even Stephen King could not imagine such a creepy place.

Somewhere around trip number 56 million, my father succumbed to battle fatigue, and lost it.  He charged back up the stairs from the cellar as though something was hot on his heels (which it may have been...an alligator, swamp creature, zombie, Rodent of Unusual Size), made it as far as the foyer and hollered up the stairs to my mother, "Turn off that (unprintable word) air conditioner in the guest room.  I'm not replacing another (string of unprintable words) fuse."

"I'm trying to keep the room cool for Walter (my cousin's fiance).  He won't want to change in a hot room."  My mother was a veteran of many such campaigns, and this did not phase her in the least.

At the end of his rope (which on a really good day is about three inches long), my father exploded like a bomb, "I don't give a s@#t what Walter wants!"

No sooner did the last word leave his mouth than we heard a knock at the screen door behind him, and there was Walter.  A direct hit!

Without missing a beat, my father turned, stuck out his hand, and said, "Oh.  Hello Walter," and then walked away.

Always Call A Profesional

Once again, it is fall, and once again, I will want to beat the snot out of the heating guy when he comes to do the fall inspection.

It's nothing personal.  It probably won't even be the same guy who came last year.  And that is the problem.  Sort of.

You see, since we have moved in, our first floor has temperatures resembling Siberia, while our basement is more like visiting the Equator. In July.  At noon.  Wearing a parka.  Holding one of those reflective thingeys.  And every time I get someone from the heating company to come out, whether for fall or spring service, I get a different theory as to why that is, but no actual solution.  Sort of.

Meanwhile, if I remember my high school science correctly, it's only a matter of time before it starts to rain or snow in the stairwell.  Yipee.

We suspected something was wrong right after we moved in and, while Tim was on the first floor,  huddling over my scented candles and looking longingly at the Yule log on TV, I had to put on my bathing suit and six coats of clinical strength deodorant just to run down to the basement for three minutes.

So I called the heating company that had installed the heater and arranged for them to come out and fix it. (I believe it was a fairly polite request, but at the time, I may have been a bit delirious from the heat stroke I had suffered when I attempted to work out in our basement gym for the first time, so I may have gone all Dirty Harry on them.)  Either way, they showed up, pronto.

"The problem is the ducts," the guy told me.  "There's flaps inside that direct the heat up or down."

"Great, then you can fix them, and we're good to go."

"Nope.  Not that easy," he grunted.

Yeah.  As opposed to all the other things in my life that are.  By the way, can you tell the paramedics when they arrive that I'd like the rehydrating IV placed in my left arm, so that I can smack you with my right?

"Because...?" I prompted.

"I don't know which duct leads up and which leads down."

"Well, can you figure it out, since you guys were the ones to install the ducts?"  Perhaps we should just send in the A-Team instead or a really, really bit hamster with a webcam.

"I can guess, and if I'm wrong, you can just move the flaps the opposite way if it doesn't work."

Wow.  Glad I called in the professionals.  I'll bet the DIY network has come knocking at your door more than once.

Spotting a booklet and some papers stuck to the side of the heater, I suggested the correct answer might be found there.  Bingo! the schematic for the whole heating system was there.  In no time at all,  my visit to the tropics would be but a fond memory, and that mirage of an oasis I could see in the corner would turn back into some paint cans and an old plant stand.  Triumphantly, I shoved it under his nose.

"Still doesn't help," he shook his head.  "Can't tell because I don't know where we are exactly according to this."

Really?  They didn't put a big red X or yellow dot saying 'you are here' on it?  Clearly, the installer was not as knowledgeable or as dedicated to his craft as you.

"Well, it says 'storage' here," I jabbed at the map, "and we are standing in the storage room," I gestured to the shelved loaded with assorted Christmas and Halloween decorations, "so I'm guessing we would be here."

A bead of sweat the size of a watermelon trickled off my chin to emphasize where I was pointing.

"I guess I'll try, but like I said, you may have to redo it yourself," he stuck to his original prognosis despite the fact that smoke had started to come out of my ears.  "Do you have post-its so I can label which way I think the flaps go?"

At this point, I gladly escaped both him and the heat to get the post-its, since it prevented me from either passing out (and I was afraid that I would have to rely on Magellan there to get us out of the sweatbox we called a basement) or choking him with my bare hands.

Surprisingly, his highly knowledgeable solution did not work, and neither did attempting to flip the flaps.  Shocker.

Once again, I called the heating company and this time a different guy showed up who took one look at what his co-worker had done and shook his head.

"Never touch the flaps," he lectured me, pulling post-its off, right and left.  "That was totally the wrong thing to do."

Hope blossomed somewhere deep inside me.

"What you need to do is close all the vents down in the basement and direct the heat up," he pronounced.

Way ahead of you guy.  "I did, except for the one in the bedroom down here and it's better, but the upstairs is still much colder."

"Hmmm. "  He pondered for a moment.

"Do you change the filters every month?"

Yes.

"Clean out the ducts regularly?"

You mean the new ducts in our new house?  Really?!

"Is the thermostat near a door or window?"

Nope.

"Then I guess that's just the way your system works," he shrugged.

Fabulous in-depth analysis.  And here I thought the first guy was useless.  I briefly contemplated chaining him in the basement a la Kathy Bates in Misery, until he came up with a more acceptable solution, but upon second thought realized that there was the distinct possibility that that would never happen, so decided instead to move on to guy #3.

I was beginning to feel like I was on the old Dating Game show, but instead of the three men of my dreams, it was more like choosing between Larry, Moe or Curly with the grand prize being an all expense paid trip to the middle of the Saraha desert.

Guy 3 unplugged some device on the side of the heater after replacing that filter and recommended covers for the air-conditioning units outside before going on his merry way back to his lovely climate controlled car.

I guess to him, it wasn't really a big deal that the National Zoo was contacting us to open a Brazillian rainforest exhibit in our basement, but I was really tired of  starting my workouts by sweating so much I looked like I  I had just swum the English Channel.

And so it went, through guy 4 and 5.  They each shook their heads, tinkered around with something on the heater, criticized whatever the last guy did and made pretty much useless suggestions before leaving us to wallow in our misery. 

Finally, though, the last guy (I'm guessing, based on previous experience that it was pure dumb luck) seemed to solve the worst of the problems (or maybe it was a cumulative effect).  And so we are set until guy7 (or is it 8?) comes and tells me how he didn't know what he was talking about and sends us back to that tropic isle...with Gilligan as our repair guy again.