Doldrums, caffeine, lost teeth and best-laid plans

People, I can darn near set my watch by the 2:00 doldrums. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing. I could be running away from a rabid alligator, scrambling for my life through the Everglades, and yet, come 2:00…zzzzzzzzz…so…tired…want…nap…

It does not help that last night, I went to bed at a darned decent hour, and then woke up two hours later with hot flashes and feeling like I was going to hurl. Which I did not. Which somehow pissed me off.

I don’t claim this is a particularly rational response to not throwing up in the middle of the night, but there it was. Look here, body! If you’re going to get me out of bed in the middle of the night for puking, AT LEAST PUKE! Don’t do this ‘no, just kidding, we’re just nauseous’ thing to me!!

Fortunately, I have learned to get everything I really want done done before 2:00. Anything else I might get done between 2:00 and bedtime is just icing.

So to perk myself up a little this afternoon (it doesn’t work, but I live in a state of eternal hopefulness) I made myself a quick triple lowfat mocha…what? Yes. I know that it is approximately a million degrees outside. BELIEVE ME, I know – all the Denizens are trapped inside with their dear mama today due to the searing heat outside. But, well…I believe this will explain better than a thousand words:

I am 85% Addicted to Coffee

See, some people would consider this to be ‘significantly addicted’. Personally, I think it means, ‘still have 15% worth of wriggle room’.

I could quit any time I want. I just don’t wanna. Nyah.

ANYWAY.

So I’m making my mocha and am approaching the all-important ‘milk frothing’ stage when Boo Bug suddenly calls from upstairs, “Mommy, where are you?”

“Down here.” Oy. Please tell me you’re not about to tattle on somebody…

“Where?”

“Down. Here.” Mommy hasn’t had her afternoon coffee yet, darling, do not irritate mommy or she may sell you to the gypsies. Who do NOT have cable!!

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Makin’ coffee.” Writing an aria. Chatting with the pope. Solving world hunger. Geez!

“Oh. Can you…stop?”

Oh great. Now, this probably means that Captain Adventure is doing something horrid, like stuffing all the toilet paper into the bathtub or drinking toilet water or something like that.

“Why?” I ask, cautiously.

“Because I think it might be time to pull my tooth out now,” she replied calmly, and walked in pointing at her loose tooth, which is now dangling by the merest thread.

This, people, is her first loose tooth. For her to be so calm is truly miraculous – this is the same child who once screamed and carried on so violently about a tiny splinter in a park that she literally drove another mother and her offspring away, the scene being too laden with sorrow for her to bear (rookie!).

“Wow,” I said. “Let me see…”

One slight anxious whimper and ping! The tiny little tooth was in my hand. Boo Bug ran off to examine her new empty space and I rinsed the tooth carefully, marveling at how tiny and perfect it was. Her babyhood, in my palm…my little Boo, heading off to kindergarten in a little over a month, my sweet little baby losing her teeth…hmm…I don’t suppose she could lose the darkened one I almost knocked out of her head next…? Because I hate it when people notice that darker tooth and say, “Oh, honey, did you hit your mouth or something?” and she turns up her beautiful little cherub face and cheerfully says, in her sweet little voice, “No, mommy hit me in the face with her knee!!”

…and then…

They look at me.

Please, dear $DEITY, let that @*^&@ing dark brown front tooth be the next to go, thank you hallelujah amen.

So we had all due excitement and tried to call daddy at work and got his voice mail (drat) and agreed that the tooth fairy would be most pleased by the cleanliness of the tooth and the obvious good care taken of it whilst in her mouth and then as the excitement died down I realized I’d neglected my coffee.

I mixed it up anyway. Because a person with an 85% caffeine addiction does not let espresso go to waste, even if it has to go into microwaved milk.

When I returned to my desk, the architect had sent us an email regarding our permanently-stalled plans saying, “I can finish the floor and the floor beams, but I can’t do the calculations on the roof. You need a structural engineer for that part.”

Here, let me translate that: “This is going to cost you yet more money before you ever even pick up a hammer.”

This is why I was so adamant about not allowing the husband to take a sledgehammer to any part of the Den. This old hen has pecked around in this particular poop before. I know how these things go with us: We jump in with both feet before we know what, exactly, we’re jumping into, and then we climb out of the poop saying, “Oh. Uh. Heh-heh. That, uh, that was poop, huh?” “Yes, dear, I do believe it was.”

We’ve already got a little bit of poop in the form of the storage shed, a $160 monthly expense incurred months ago when we were planning to sell the Den. You know, before we realized that selling right now would be next to impossible and that we’d have to wait about sixteen years before getting an offer due to market saturation? And high foreclosure counts? Meaning that you could get this same house for pennies on the dollar at the county courthouse?

You see the problem.

ANYWAY.

I just want to bring all our stuff home from the storage shed, put it back where it damned well belongs, and relax about it for a while. I have a gut feeling that this project is on permanent hold at this point, and really I’d rather not make myself any crazier than need be about it.

In somewhat related news, anybody who ever utters these words: “Hey! Don’t put that box in there! You might scratch the bed!” ought to have the keys to their Ram 350000000 taken from his hand, be whumped upside the head with them, forced into a Gremlin and told to keep his pasty-white behind O-U-T of a seriously red-blooded, hard-working, manly-man vehicle like a pickup truck. Seriously. It defiles the good name of the pickup truck, having little girly-men prancing around worrying that there might be a {gasp!} scratch in the bed.

{deadpan} Oh. The unmitigated horror. A pickup truck with a scratch in the bed. Somebody call 911. {/deadpan}

Sorry. I digress. I mean! (Sorry, here we go again…) Sometimes a person might be somewhat irrational about shiny things that become, well, unshiny, even if by design they are going to be un-shined. I’ve done it myself, most notably when I got all upset over a throwing knife getting scratched during target practice.

Yes, really.

It was not one of my more sensible moments.

“Hey, I just threw this knife with as much force as I could muster into that block of wood, and it got scratched!” Duh. Ya THINK?! But still, it was shiny and new and when I yanked it out and there was a big old scratch down it, I went, “Awwwww….it’s SCRATCHED!” like it was some kind of shocking outcome. It’s just a thing with us. But we get over it, ya know? We do. I mean, I did, anyway. I rather quickly realized that I was being stupid, and the boys all had a good (but cautious – I’m a good shot with a throwing knife, actually) laugh at me and we all moved on.

But a guy who buys a big old honkin’ pickup truck, one of those ultra-king-cab-you-could-put-an-entire-apartment-back-there monsters, is Making A Certain Statement, right? A “Lookit me, I’m a cowboy!” kinda statement, right?

What kind of cowboy, WHAT KIND OF COWBOY I DEMAND TO KNOW, would saunter out of the bar, push back the Stetson and drawl out, “Hey there, Slick, don’t be puttin’ that hoe in the bed there – it might scratch it!” Not once, but repeatedly?

Really.

It offends me on so many levels.

Like nonfat ice cream and low-carb pizza, it’s just plain wrong.