Just like a Slattery

I have been.

It started with feeling like I had a piano wire stretched across my throat last week, and I knew it was headed downhill.

The sore throat was followed by the stopped-up head and the hot eyeballs, and then the ridiculous coughing and sneezing.

My plan of attack is always Alka-Seltzer Cold Plus, which does not have the good stuff in it anymore, but it’s better than anything else out there.  And sleep, lots and lots of sleep.

I’ve been asleep more since Friday evening more than I’ve been awake, and it’s been evermore boring. When I’ve been awake, I’ve been painting at the cabinet doors, which I had intended to finish by Sunday.

I also had lunch with my friend Larry and his previously new-to-me girlfriend, Jan. Larry and I have known each other so long we sort of look alike, except he’s hairier. Then I came home and went back to bed.

Jan is a saint, because Larry and I are terribly amused with tales of the people we know in common and with ourselves, and she didn’t snap.

I had thought I’d go back to work today, but to add insult to injury, I woke up with a migraine.  I felt so horrid that I didn’t even get up and get dressed, and everybody who knows me knows that I get dressed every single day in case I get an opportunity to jet off to Paris or something.

I’ve felt like Keith Richards looks, but now I feel better. I believe I’ll have a shower and put on some makeup before bed, in case I shuffle off to my reward in my sleep.

eta: I haven’t forgotten the information for you, Shani.

1. Today is Bastille Day. I know it is Bastille Day because the importance of it was drilled into me by the inimitable David Franklin, history professor extraordinaire. I have always enjoyed history because I was fortunate to have some excellent teachers along the way, but David made it come alive.

2. I have still to paint the outsides of two of the cabinet doors, put the drawers back in, and do some touch-up work, but aside from that, the kitchen is done. Yay, Grimace!

3. Last night I dreamed that I was missing an opportunity to have lunch with Heather B. Armstrong, but I didn’t really care because I don’t like chicken breast that much.

4. I also dreamed that I got back to my office building at night just in time to catch the last two songs of an Aerosmith concert, but Bon Jovi had already played. Abdul, the night security man, told me I should ask him if he would do another song for me, so I went up to him in his very fly electric blue 1977 Monte Carlo and asked him and he said yes.

5. Suze Orman is very easy to make fun of, and I’m pretty sure her silvery eyeliner is tattooed on, but I read her book and it changed my life. Also, I think she probably wears a jacket to bed.

6. I went to a makeup party at my hair salon last evening and my friend (and hero) Christine (funniest woman in the world) gave me smoky eyes. I sort of gave myself smoky eyes this morning. I should have taken a picture while I had the chance.

7. Marcy asked me the other night if I had a quote I had made up myself, and I asked if she meant like that time I told a contractor he would find it easier to shove butter up a tiger’s ass with a hot poker than to get one more dime out of me, and she said, “yes, but you don’t want that on your tombstone. Do you?” And I have been giving that some thought, but I hope I don’t need a tombstone any time soon. I have always joked that I wanted a marker in the ground that when stepped upon would blast out “Don’t Do Me Like That,” loud.

8. I have not had my car washed since I got it. For those keeping track, that’s nine months. I have, however, kept it clean of debris.

9. My hair is long enough for pigtails now. Unfortunately I look like an idiot with pigtails.

10. Two of my high school teachers died last week. I wasn’t expecting that, and am unspeakably sad about it. I think I expected them to live at the school forever.

Guess what?

I had to change the color of the cabinets.

The dark purple was just too goth for who I am.

Naturally, I painted all of the cabinets, including inside the doors, before I came to my realization.

Grimace is here, and he’s painting the walls, so it’s going pretty quickly (wells, as quickly as anything goes when it’s the two of us working on a project together).

It would be going faster if I didn’t keep leaning on the drawer panel under the sink every time I have to wash a brush, however.

Someone, and it’s me, and needs to go to bed. I’m getting punchy.

By the way, it’s a very nautical blue. And the walls are eggshell.

…when a married man has profiles on several online dating sites?

I don’t make a habit of watching Hoda & Kathie Lee on the fourth hour of “The Today Show,” but I happened to be home the other day and they had a segment called Guys Tell All and that was the question a woman asked.

I turned off the television before I could see the rest of it, but I already knew the answer and will share it with you:

He is planning to date someone who is not you.

I wish I knew what she thought they were going to say, because I’m pretty sure I know about what she hoped they would say, but you don’t go to the funeral home if you’re not planning a funeral, if you know what I mean (and I think you do).

I should be an advice columnist. Someone get me in touch with Hoda and Kathie Lee.

I’m bored.

Not really, I’m not.

And if I were, I’d die before I ever admitted to it.

I grew up being told only boring people are bored.

There was such a stigma attached to being boring that I’d have rather been the poor trash down the road than be the boring girl on the corner, because at least the poor trash had a story to tell.

The common response to “I’m bored” was “you better find something to do or I’ll find you something.”

Except once. I told my grandmother, my dear, practical grandmother with the sharp tongue, I was bored and she turned around and put her square hands on the kitchen table and looked me right in the eye and said, “Lamebrain.”

Then she turned back to her cake making without another word.

That cured me quick-fashion of my boredom, because the very last thing I wanted was my grandmother thinking I was stupid.

I don’t think since then I’ve uttered the words, “I’m bored,” nor do I think I’ve let myself get bored. I always have something to read or some paper I can make a list on or some knitting or something I can do, because I don’t ever want to feel that way again – like I can’t come up with something to occupy my mind.

So find something to do with your time, or I’ll find you something to do with it.

1. In Target on Sunday, I saw a lady wearing yoga pants that were so low I could not only see her hiney, I could see her crack. I hate the word crack used in this context.

Because I am a very klassy person, I pointed it out to the lady who was ringing me up and she said, “Oooh, she is going to get herself in trouble, even if it’s just people talking bad about her. That is a straight mess. Peoples’ mamas ought to teach ’em not to go out showing they bee-hinds.”

2. On the way to lunch today, I saw a woman waiting to cross the street wearing a very nice, crisp shirt and patterned tights. Tights.

Tights are not pants. Tights are tights and belong with a dress or a skirt or something of some description over them, otherwise people will know you have lost your mind.

3. At the place where I got my lunch, there was a lady wearing a sundress composed of hundreds of lace flowers sewn together. And a thong. Not two thongs on her feet, but a thong in her crack (see above). Not for nothing, but they sell slips right at the mall.

I prayed that she would not turn around, but alas, God must have been otherwise occupied, because she did turn around and I am here to tell you that she could have at least worn a matching brassiere. Or not worn her bathing suit coverup  as a dress.

Yep. Peoples’ mamas ought to teach ’em not to go out showing they bee-hinds.

Phones and the obsession therewith.

People who constantly lose and break their phones make me nuts. Just put it in your pocket or your pocketbook. Don’t leave it lying about.

If you’re riding the Ferris wheel or kayaking down the Mississippi, then why are you talking on the phone?

You shouldn’t drop it in the toilet because nobody wants to talk to you while you’re tending to bathroom matters anyway.

Also? Just because it rings does not mean you have to answer it.

My friend Lynn is the best person I know because if we are out to dinner and it rings, she does not answer the damn phone unless she has warned me ahead of time that she is expecting a call, and even so, she tends to business in a hurry. Whoever is calling can wait until we are finished dining or find the can opener themselves or call 911. And my company is apparently plenty good for her without talking to people who are not actually present.

I, personally, try to be conscientious of my phone manners and sometimes I fail, but I swear I see people out to dinner and everybody at the table is on the phone with someone else, or is texting, or worse, one person is and the other is just sitting there patiently waiting, and all I can think is they must purely hate each other.

That is all.

when I feel like volunteering for the witness protection program.

How bad could North Dakota be?

I noticed a soap wrapper in the waste paper basket in the bathroom when I got home this afternoon. Curious.

It’s not that I don’t use soap. It’s that I don’t use that kind of soap anymore. And that there’s already a nearly whole bar of soap in the shower. And there’s liquid soap on the sink.

In my head I thought, “Oh, well! At least they ain’t still here!” in a Butterfly McQueen voice.

I might should have considered it further, but really, what am I going to do about it? The house has a security system. Nothing seems to be missing. The dog is still here.

And then I remembered.

I read a lot and I’m naturally curious. If I’m looking up one word in the dictionary, I tend to end up reading the whole page. If I’m reading a blog or a news story, I look up other things.

One blogger I read sometimes mentioned that she’d been having Restless Legs Syndrome lately and was having to get out of bed and stomp around and what have you, and that she’d heard about putting a bar of soap under the fitted sheet, and had finally tried it, and against all reason it worked.

Then I had to read the comments to her post, and all these people had tried it and it had worked for them too! And then I had to Google it and do you know there are over 500 entries about that soap thing?

But all that’s not what I remembered.

What I remembered was that in the ridiculous hours of this morning, I was awakened by a horrific cramp in my left calf that I couldn’t rub out.

I got out of my bed and rooted around in the bathroom closet for a bar of soap and unmade the bed so I could get that bar of soap in there. At 2:38 in the ayem.

And then I went back to bed and was troubled no more.

And now there is a bar of soap in my bed. I think I’ll leave it for the cleaning lady to puzzle over.

Not that I actually need anything lawyered, but I got it into my head that I needed to get my affairs in order last year, and there is a bunch of lawyers right down the hall from my office, so right before Christmas, I collared one of them and told him I needed a will and whatever goes with it.

I happen to like all those lawyers because they’re nice, despite what everybody says about all lawyers being assholes. Or maybe they’re just nice to me. And they’re funny.

My own particular lawyer, who I selected because he happened to be standing at the elevator at the moment I decided all of this, is especially funny.

I have been told that he will get on the phone and just raise Cain at somebody if he feels like it, but I’ve never seen it happen. Plus he has a little refrigerator under his desk that he keeps full of sugary soft drinks in cans. He doesn’t seem to mind that sometimes I wander down there and ask for a Coke, and he knows that Coke might mean Fanta Orange.

So I don’t know how to write a will. I Googled some, but that was really no help, because all those wills were rich-people wills, and I’m not rich. Those wills were, for want of a better term, written by eccentric people, eccentric being the term you use when a person is crazy but has a lot of money. If I wrote a will like that, people would just think I’m crazy.

What I have is a house and a fairly big piece of land that it’s sitting on. And a bunch of personal effects that certain people want (I know because they told me so). So there was no way around writing a crazy people will.

I sat down and made a considered list of my things and how they needed to be distributed. What my attorney said was “all you have to do is make the list and out beside it put a dash and ‘Aunt Judy’ or whoever.”

I did that, but it looked so bare that way. I couldn’t stand it. I like things in sentence form. So I went back and put it all in complete sentences and formated it all nicely and took it down to him and paid him.

He didn’t mention it, and I didn’t mention it, though I was sure he had read it, which made me think it was special double cranky crazy, even by his standards, even when I had to go down there and get some other papers taken care of.

Today I stopped by his office with the other papers and he said, “Hey. I have your will. Reckon we ought to sit down with that and finish it up?”

He didn’t say it, but I bet he’s thinking I have specific funeral instructions, and I do.

While I was down there, I remembered that my mother and stepfather had been planning to go to Helen this past weekend, but didn’t because a friend of theirs had died and his brother, a celebrity known to people of a certain age, was there and they are spending time with him. I was telling my attorney this story, and that he was probably at their house at that very minute having a ham sandwich on…

…and he picked it up right there and finished it: white bread with mayonnaise squishing out the sides and a piece of iceberg lettuce and a slice of tomato and some Lay’s potato chips. Oooh hail yes!

And this, friends, is how I know I have the right attorney.