Janie had a pretty good birthday yesterday and loved all her gifts. The MP3 player was the major hit, though the Monster High Frankie doll was a close second.
She balked, however, at having her ears pierced as a surprise. I’m using balk as a euphemism for burst into tears. She wanted time to prepare and she wanted her own stuffed animal to hold. So we re-scheduled for the next day. My only stipulation was that if she was doubtful, she should tell me before we went all the way to the Mall.
That night Sunny wanted to sleep in our bed. So she crawled in and fell asleep without our knowledge. Neither her father nor I realized where she was, or that she hadn’t gone potty at all after dinner . . . until she started hollering that she was wet. Our bed doesn’t have a vinyl mattress cover. It has a pillow top.
When I woke up this morning—wishing we’d opted for the sleeper sofa—my husband told me that my college alma mater’s football team, which didn’t win a single home game until I was a junior,* won an actual bowl. Then he told me it was the GoDaddy! dot com Bowl. My apologies to the players and the company, but I believe that this is the dumbest name for a major sporting event ever. I thought the Tostitos Bowl was iffy, but this . . . I’m relinquishing what few bragging rights I had to this victory.
On my way to work, I stopped for gas and nearly died of hypothermia at the pumps. It was negative 10F with windchill. And oh, Lord, was there windchill. I don’t care that I sound like a wimp to the people from Minnesota or upper New York. It was cold, the pump nozzle thingie was metal and my gloves cost a dollar.
A scheduling problem had me working for a departmentI haven’t set foot in for six months, when I covered someone’s lunch hour. After eleven years, I can put my hands on almost any book in my department but I was prepared to try everyone’s patience today.
Plus, I had to take a one o’clock lunch. Wah.
I had a blast. I found everything but one children’s book, which I later discovered to be under the arm of one of our younger patrons—a clear case of finders-keepers. I was able to hand recommended a few of my favorites, too, and tracked down the third season of Shonen Jump’s Yu-Go-OH! for an older man who was so grateful I was taking him seriously that he didn’t care if I had to Interlibrary Loan ten separate episodes from four different libraries.
And the deli made me a fresh chicken club salad because the last prepared one was sold thirty minutes before I came in. The chicken was warm and the entire place smelled like frying bacon. Mmmm. And I managed to get the replacement for my beloved chapter three outlined.
I also discovered I’d deleted the revised chapter sixteen . . . but found the copy first Reader had sent me with her comments! Whew!
I missed Janie’s birthday party. Not sure if that was in the plus or minus column. The kids had a blast, my husband took lots of pictures, and I didn’t have my usual party anxiety—so I’m going with plus.
The commute home was lovely. The night was clear, the ice on the Mississippi was smooth and lovely, and the lady on Prairie Home Companion was singing about the Carribean in one of the loveliest voices I’ve ever heard.
When I got home, Janie had decided that she needed to get her ears pierced now. So we sallied forth, leaving my husband to cook dinner. We returned an hour and a half later. Jane will have to wait until she’s eighteen to get pierced ears or she convinces my husband to take her. I have proved that the definition of insanity is not just a saying. The forty dollar** January birthstone studs that Janie picked out are in my ears, cartilage piercings have a five-dollar surcharge, and we shall not discuss it further.
Except to say that I like how they look.
It’s now nine o’clock and everyone has gone to bed but me. I’m going to finish this blog post and work on the murder of a lovely, unselfish person who doesn’t deserve what’s about to happen to her. And my Sunday School plans.***
All in all, I think we’ll call it a draw.
___
*I was in the Marching Band. That’s nearly three seasons of constant defeat—in fact the total losing streak was twenty games, which at the time made us number one in the country for something. When they finally won, the entire university carried one set of goalposts from the stadium about three miles and three blocks uptown into the bar district. My husband tells me that the chant started out “We want Notre Dame!” and degenerated into “We want free beer!” That sounds about right.
**That includes the piercing, a huge bottle of disinfectant, and, I assume, combat pay for the store personnel.
***Yes, I am. Yes, the priest is aware of it. We do cool stuff—like make bird feeders out of toilet paper tubes and peanut butter and way too much birdseed, and build the Temple of Jerusalem out of sugar cubes and frosting. When it fell down—everyone was sampling the cement—we declared that we’d recreated Jericho and learned a new song.
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Earful of Cider 