At about 6:00 p.m. yesterday, Michael is going through our mail and suddenly yells out, “Oh shit!” I knew whatever it was must be pretty bad, because his voice went pre-puberty on him for a second. Last time his voice went all Mickey Mouse like that, it was because they had cancelled “Farscape.”

Being careful not to make any sudden movements, I asked, “So what’s wrong? Did we get another gas bill?” (Yeah, sure we get one every month, but they get more and more shocking, so I step lightly around the subject.)

He seemed to have gone catatonic as he stared down at the paper. The sound of my voice seemed to jar him slightly back into our world. He sputtered his response as best he could,”Your cell phone bill. It’s a hundred dollars!”

I fear that someday he’ll be going through bills and he’ll get so far away we’ll require the help of a minipsychic go-between to help him navigate between dimensions. “Go into the light, Michael.
There are potato chips and Tofutti bars in the light.”

Thankfully, a psychic wasn’t neccessary this time. I simply had to feign shock and concern and furrow my brow in a show of remorse.

I guess I pulled off the remorseful thing pretty well, because he shut up about it after a minimal amount of fussing.

Anyhow, later last night, we were doing a Sudoku puzzle in bed. Let me interrupt myself here for a moment and explain something to my younger readers. It’s about the birds and the bees:

When birds and bees love each other very much, they get married. Unless they are same-sex birds and bees, in which case, their state might have a constitutional ban. Anyway, all the same, they will have sex. A lot. During the first five or ten years. Then, after a while, the birds and bees are just kinda tired at the end of the day, and it doesn’t seem so important to be physically expressive. Their allergies are acting up and they are sore, so they do puzzles together. The bird might even read a Tom Clancy novel while the bee knits a scarf for her sister. They still love each other very much and they have still have sex sometimes. Just not when they have a new episode of “Deadwood” taped. You see?

So, back to last night. We finish the puzzle and Michael gets up to turn out hall light. He notices the bathroom light next to Charlotte’s room is on as well. He puts on pants so he can turn that one off too, because he doesn’t want me to have to get up. “What do you do, Debbie? Before we get in bed, do you run wildly around the house turning lights on?” He waves his arms crazily in the air to illustrate how silly I am. (This cracks me up.)

“That’s exactly what I do, Michael. You hit the nail right on the head. You know what else I enjoy doing while I’m running around turning on all the lights?”

“No? What?”

“Talking on my cell phone.”

At eighteen months old, pizza does double duty as both a meal and a hair accessory.

As luck would have it, our lawnmower caught fire yesterday. It’s probably my fault. Nobody got hurt in the accident, but the lawnmower is now only good as a conversation piece.

All day at work this afternoon, when people asked how I was, I’d respond, “Fine…Our lawnmower caught fire yesterday.” I rather enjoyed having that information available as a kind of jumpstart in communication. Because, inevitably, folks say, “Wow! What happened? Real flames?”

Yes, yes. Real flames, and I put it out with a hose.

My daughter was pushing it at the time. Some parents spank, others ground their kids. Me? I opt for the flaming yard equipment. The smell of burning gasoline tends to stay with a child and bring your point right home.

Seriously, though, the whole episode scared the living crap out of me. The 20 seconds or less of my screaming, “Oh my God! Get away from it, Charlotte! It’s on fire!” seemed to last an eternity. The kid never noticed the fire or me screeching like a banshee until I was right up in her face.

We still don’t know what caused the fire. I did spill a little more gasoline than usual when filling the tank, and there was some dry grass on top of the mower. It could have been that, I suppose. It could have been that the gas line came loose or the gas cap wasn’t on tight enough. All I know for sure is this: I need a babysitter. It’s not safe for me and Charlotte to be left alone. We get into mischief every time.

I had meant to tell you today about my potato salad misadventure, but that story lost out to the story with danger. It’s like “Star Wars” playing alongside, I dunno, “Fried Green Tomatoes” – the food story will wait for video.

So, folks, it’s been a while, because, well…I’M BORING. My hope and my challenge are that something even remotely interesting might happen before I can finish this run-on sentence — which is unlikely at best, when you consider that I’m sitting all alone in front of a computer monitor at 12:25 a.m. on Saturday night.

My poker addiction continues. I’ve gained nothing from it but grief. I lose way more often than I win. Yet, I keep playing and telling myself that I’m a good player. In no other area of my life do I delude myself quite so readily. The fact that I called poker an “area of my life” should hint at how far the delusion has seeped in. Seriously, it’s a sickness, and it’s all gonna end in tears.

I was watching poker on t.v. the other day, and one of the players admitted that a lot of his game is luck, or at least that’s what I think he said. The actual quote was more like, “Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.” What the fuck?! Do pigs prefer acorns to, say, even their own feces?! If so, I NEED DOCUMENTATION! I’d almost understand if this guy was like eighty years old and talking in bad albeit charmingly colloquial analogies, but the man was maybe twenty at most and already way too far down the road to the funny farm.

Anyway, be kind to me, because I’ve probably only got a precious few months before I’m saying crazy shit on television. Even a blind donkey falls into a bucket of apples when there are apples in the road (which are in a bucket). Yeah. See. It’s like that.

My only hope is that once I lose my mind there will be enough of a change in my behavior so that someone will actually notice. My record on the sanity issue hasn’t been good this week. I accidentally put regular dish-washing liquid in the dishwasher. Well, let me re-phrase that. I purposely put it in, I just didn’t know what I was putting in. See, I had bought the wrong thing, which happens sometimes when you don’t bother to read the large print on an item that you put in your shopping cart. Then, once I had the wrong item home, I still didn’t read the label, because it was like two whole words long and who has time for that literary shit when there are dishes to be done, right?

Anyway, I unknowingly sabotaged the dishwasher and went off to bed, leaving Michael to find a floor full of suds in the kitchen. He cleaned up my mess and told me about it the next morning. My poor, dear, long suffering Ricky Ricardo! He should shoot me in the head and be done. He could have me gaze off into the distance and tell me how it’s gonna be when me and him live off the land and get some rabbits and I’ll get to tend them rabbits and…BAM. All’s well that ends well.

To Be Continued…