Monday is Not My Friend

         I find Mondays (or Monderdays as I like to call them) to be generally tough.  Sunday’s too short and then Monday is here and I’m showering at 5:00 a.m. so I can start the 5 days of madness known as the work week.  Somehow the first day is the hardest for getting both myself and the princess motivated to get ready for school.  It’s a wrestling match trying to get her dressed and put together on time for the bus.  I always win but she sure puts up a good passive aggressive fight.  Once at work my five hours of fun begins and we run around preparing food to sell to the hungry teenagers that are our clientele, all the while sounding like a gaggle of geese exchanging pleasantries and stories of our respective weekend activities with occasional bouts of venting thrown in for good measure. Nine women in a kitchen is going to be a noisy affair! At the end of the workday I’m exhausted yet find the energy to run an errand or two on the way home.  Once there, in the safe haven, a quick cup of coffee is downed and I’m on to home responsibilities.  Take something out of the freezer to defrost for dinner, make a phone call, laundry, garbage night, and assorted other house duties we all need to take care of. So I coped with my Monderday stress the best way I know how—with chips and dip and cake left over from the weekend.  I don’t want to give the impression that the day was all bad, there were laughs at work and the mailman brought a pleasant surprise.  It was an early birthday card and letter from a dear friend which really ended the day on a positive note.  So that’s my take on Monday, I hope you survive every one with at least one positive thing so that before you go to bed you feel that Monday just might be your friend after all.

What Day Is It?

Guess what day it is?!  So says a camel in a popular commercial for car insurance. This has become a daily question for me.  In the past two weeks we’ve had school & work cancelled due to bad weather 3 times, (or is it 4? I lost track), and a day off in observance of Presidents’ Day, plus the weekend.  We’ve shoveled more snow and chopped more ice than I can even talk about.  I spent 2 days feeling ill from a mild stomach bug which had me sleeping a good portion of the day.  That was mostly Thursday, and part of Friday which was Valentine’s Day. We exchanged cards and treats for V-day, the girls, my husband and I.  We had our V-day date the weekend before because Anna was able to stay with Hillary while we went out to dinner.
The next day (Saturday) we had another “little” snow storm during which I went to the dentist for what I thought was going to begin the repair of a tooth.  The tooth was beyond repair and I was in “luck”—the oral surgeon was able to fit me in right away!  My dreams of pizza for dinner were now dashed and later that evening while my family was munching away on eggrolls and other Chinese take-out I was hungrily slurping down egg drop soup—no small feat considering half my head, including my lips, was numb and I was trying to keep the soup off the stitched up vacancy in my mouth.  The following day we spent outside trying to scrape 4” of ice and compacted snow off the roof of my van, the driveway, and the roof on the house. Do we know how to have fun or what!?  My favorite thing was pulling the huge icicles off the house and stabbing them into the snowbanks. We gave up on the driveway; Mother Nature is going to have to take care of that. After our beef stew and cheddar biscuit dinner I decided to use a cake mix I found in the cabinet.  There were 2 pouches of mix in the box; one red velvet and one green velvet.  I thought it would be nice to make the red one as a V-day weekend celebration.  Mix in the bowl, oil in the bowl, then on the way to the sink for water the bowl slipped out of my hand and made a mess on the floor.  At least it missed my pants and slippers.  I cleaned it up and made the green one.  It tasted really good, but I guess it was more of a “come on spring, hurry up!” wish cake. 
   Yesterday I made a trip to the supermarket through the luge track that our local roads have become.  The cashier noted how it was busier than the weekend had been which is unusual.  I suggested that perhaps, like me, people had been digging out over the weekend and making the trek before the next snow event.  She agreed that was likely. 
 Now here I sit today, writing this when I ordinarily would be at work but, the “nuisance snow” the weather forecasters spoke about yesterday has turned into a “big pain in the you-know-where” snow.  I’m going to have to go out there before Bruce gets home and shovel the new snow off the top of the 4” ice base. I guess Mother Nature isn’t ready to take care of that yet.  At least I’ll burn up some calories to counteract the green cake; and I still have no concept of what day it is.

Silliness

I love being silly.  I love it so much I am silly almost every day.  I feel like being silly is like a mini vacation from the realities of life.  Laughing follows silliness and spurs it on.  Sometimes at work, for instance, I’ll just start singing the theme from the Magilla Gorilla cartoon show from my childhood. Laughter generally follows.  Once one of my coworkers and I sang the whole Zippity Do Dah song.  I’m not sure which Disney movie that’s from, but we sang it all the way through.  Just because we can is why.  Recently when I signed onto Facebook there was a friend suggestion waiting for me.  I am now friends with one of my friends’ pet bird. Yesterday we Puffy-Bird and I) had a short conversation on her timeline.  My husband and daughter looked at me as if I’d lost my mind when they found out.  I defended myself by telling them that I have been Facebook friends with another friend’s cat, and I play Words With Friends with her (the cat) so why shouldn’t I be friends with the bird?  My husband went back to what he was doing and my daughter said that although she never thought she’d say it, she’s glad we have no pets.    Sometimes I remember silly things that happened in the past and just start giggling to myself.  Usually I’m alone when this happens but there are occasions when my husband and daughter are sitting in the same room as me.  They’ve learned to ignore it, unless I insist on telling them what I’m thinking about.  Sometimes they chuckle but usually they just give some noncommittal remark like “oh” before turning their attention back to what they were doing.  I really don’t care.  Better I should be sitting here breaking out into giggles than sobs.  I have learned to embrace the silly part of me, the part that delights in the absurdities of life.  I hope you can get silly sometimes too and give your brain a rest from the worries of your life for a few moments time.