In first grade, I was a math genius, at least for the first couple of months when all we had to deal with was single digit addition. I could race through a math worksheet in no time flat, reliably getting them handed back to me with smiley faces and stars. Think of it: a 6 year old mathematical prodigy!
The fun stopped abruptly and painfully. I was baffled that we had been working so diligently on “adding to” and now we were “taking away”. Why would anyone want less via subtraction when there was a plentiful supply via addition? Suddenly there was this thing called “subtraction” and I was dead meat in the water. No more smiley faces or stars on my work, just a lot of angry “X’s”. My mom tried working with me at home, using household things. “10 walnuts, but I take away 4. How many walnuts are left?” Clearly still 10 because all you did was move the walnuts to the other side of the table, THEY ARE RIGHT THERE, LADY! It just made no sense at all to me.
Of course it just got increasingly over time. So many hours with hideous multiplication flash cards. I mainly relied on the hope and guess method. I was fairly competent multiplying things by 2s, 5s (my favorite), 10s and 11s (once I learned the trick) but anything weird like 9s or 6s can make me clammy and uncomfortable to this day. And when those absolutely painful word problems started (If 2 trains leave the station…), I just shut down entirely.
It got worse and worse over the years. 3 tries to get through Geometry (and the only reason I passed was out of mercy on the part of the teacher; either that or he was very tired of seeing my face) and I tried to pay someone to take my math class in college. I’m not even sorry; I still think it was a great show of thinking outside the box and creative problem solving. But don’t do what I did. It’s wrong.
I’m wary of spiders. Lots of respect for them but no personal love. As in: I don’t want them near my person.
Today, at 4:22 am, I woke with an itchy forehead. Sleepily, I turned on the bedside light. I thought some hair had escaped my scrunchie and set out to handle it.
It was not hair. It was a freaking spider. I didn’t smash it because even in sleep fog, I knew I would die a thousand deaths if spider guts were on my face. I brushed it off. Then I screamed (acceptable) and ran to the bathroom.
I looked in the mirror. A red mark on my forehead. The reasonable, adult part of me realized it was not a bite but just a red mark. But. The unreasonable, seven year old part of me went to the darkest place: the spider laid eggs in my forehead and in due time, hundreds of baby spiders will explode from my face and I will die of horror and shock.
I haven’t looked up the average gestation of spider eggs (yet). But know this: if you didn’t wake with a spider on your face (YOUR FACE!!!) this morning, the odds are ever in your favor that you are going to have a good day.
(read that again but with your best Moira Rose voice in your head, or even out loud if you’re in the mood)
Today my topics are: Marsha (always a key player), My hair and…
Toni Home Perms.
My hair is straight. Yet in many childhood pictures (like, just so so many) you will see me with slightly wavy or even curly hair. Did my hair change over time?Yes but *not* on its own. My hair returned to it’s normal straight state once Marsha lost the right to style my hair.
I’m talking about Toni home perms. That’s right. Not a salon perm. A home perm. Marsha can perm her own hair in half an hour while rearranging a room, handling many important tasks and keeping the planets alignment. She’s that good. I have so many memories watching her get those perm rods precisely placed, the entire house reeking of noxious and toxic perm fumes. I assumed all moms did that; I’m sure many did.
I assumed I was safe from that experience and then one day (I was 10ish, the legal age your mom can chemically change the structure of your hair) and we were in the station wagon, chugging along somewhere and she glanced at me in the rearview mirror (Momovision) and said, “I’m going to give you a perm this weekend, to give your hair a little body”. I was surprised. I was a child, surely I already *had* a little body. It didn’t occur to me to ask her any questions. It was going to happen. I wasn’t concerned (she had been managing my hair all my life already), I was more concerned about the “body” word.
“Volume” wasn’t really a hair buzz word back then (that came with the introduction of L’oreal mousse, so fun to squirt a dollop on your palm and watch it grow magically into the size of an ostrich egg but omg, so sticky… my hope was that the home perm benefit would be not having to sleep in pink sponge curlers (like sleeping on pink rocks) on Saturday nights before church and also any night before Big Events.
So the weekend came and out came the surgical instruments: 1 toni home perm kit (I feel like she always had several on hand in case of a permergency [I just made that word up] and the prized box of perm curlers; she has had those suckers for at least 50 years, I can only imagine what they are worth on eBay) and the perm towel.
FYI, the contents of kit are as follows:
Active solution
Neutralizer solution
3000 tiny tissues
Instructions that she never, not once, not ever even GLANCED at; she was a Pro
NO GLOVES; no wonder she doesn’t have fingerprints
She propped me on the youth chair in the kitchen and looked at me to assess perm curler placement. Draped the Official Marsha Perm Towel over my shoulders. I wasn’t nervous and we were off to the races.
Those perm curlers are so freaking tight that you think you are trapped in an actual vise. I don’t know the exact process but I think it was:
get a piece of hair and comb it like you mean it
tell your daughter to be still over and over and over
in one deft movement, dampen the piece of hair with the activation solution, grab a perm curler torture device and wrap the hair up in tissue and perm curler thing, roll baby roll and then snap it shut and hold hair hostage
Repeat until done
We were about three perm curlers in and the smell was making my eyes water. My brother came in from the next room asking, “what’s that smell”, looked at me, said, “Oh God” (I think he was actually praying) and left to go upstairs but not without throwing me a look of pure joy at my situation first. We did not see him again that evening.
So once every strand was locked in perm jail, I think we had to wait 30 minutes. Or 30 years; not entirely sure. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I knew I was in the hands of a qualified perm specialist, so I wasn’t worried but WOW, did my head feel weird. Squeezed, smelly and I wasn’t supposed to touch anything.
While we waited, we split a can of Coke (1 ice cube in the glass, always only 1) and ate popcorn out of the Official Yellow Popcorn Bowl.
The oven timer went off, so it was time for the neutralizer solution. Before I knew it, I was on my back on the kitchen counter, head in the sink and then she started squirting the neutralizer onto the perm curlers. That was the night I discovered my head was ticklish. I thought I was going to squirm off the counter but no need to worry; Marsha employed the same tactic she used when we were in the front seat and had to stop suddenly: arm thrown over us; The Mom Seatbelt. I was safe but was in tickling agony.
Then. I had to lay on the counter and let the neutralizer do it’s thing. After that, remove the curlers, rinse (BUT DO NOT WASH), go to bed on a fresh towel and wait for the results the next morning.
Repeat every 6-9 months until daughter reaches age 16.
I think it’s important to have people in your life who possess strengths that play to your, “areas of growth”, because honestly, I need to grow in a lot of areas. Example: most of my waking hours are spent looking for things I just had a second ago.
Person X is one of those people who never loses things, always calm, deliberate, etc. I can’t remember a time when he misplaced his keys. I lose mine at least once a day because they are never in the “rabbit bowl” – my designated key place. Honestly, I should just throw the bowl in the trash because in 20+ years of owning the rabbit bowl, my keys have never been in it. *it’s not a bowl FOR rabbits, it has rabbits on it.
Anyway. Person X grills a batch of chicken on Sundays for lunch the upcoming week. I don’t know how he gets through the week eating the same thing with no surprise treats or the *exciting* thrill of throwing together a lunch consisting of a quarter sleeve of crackers, some sketchy grapes, emergency cheese sticks and the blueberry pop tart from the back of the pantry purchased on a whim three minutes before leaving for work but whatever…if he wants to Adult, fine, I can accept it.
So. Back to the Sunday grilling. We call it First Day Bird (I can’t remember why we started calling it that. Immaterial). One Sunday, first day bird was prepped and on the grill. All was normal. Or so he thought.
Somehow time got away from him and all of a sudden, it was 9:45. As a PCA (Practicing Certified Adult), he let the dog out (right on schedule) and he smelled something grilling and/or burning.
He was outraged in a way that only linear, logical thinkers can be. “What’s burning?”, “Who on EARTH would be grilling at this hour?” and so on and so forth. He thought it was a neighbor doing some reckless, late night (9:45 pm!) grilling. He was in full blown rant until the source of the smell hit him.
It was his very own First Day Bird, placed on the grill at 6:30. Only now it was almost 10 pm. I have never, in all my years of knowing him seen him in a flap about anything but in this instance, he was flapping and I was DELIGHTED. I had a front row seat to a flap that, for once, was not my own.
He rushed to the grill and howled (ok, not exactly a howl, more of an, “oh noooooo!”). I could not stop laughing, could not get it together at all. Here is what the bird looked like on the grill (bear in mind that they started as the chicken breasts pictured above);
They never had a chance…
I absolutely love it when people who Have Their Act Together have some minor mishap due to distraction because I am never NOT distracted and I think it’s healthy for them to see what it’s like in my brain, provided it’s only for a minute and doesn’t cause actual harm or distress and is temporary. Also provided they have a sense of humor, which Person X most certainly does.
I don’t know exactly how long we laughed but it was long enough that I got a solid ab workout in and tears were running down my face.
He rescued the bird remains and put them on a baking sheet, then photographed them for posterity. I may be biased but I think it could pass as fancy sculpture except they went straight into the trash (after they had stopped smoking and cooled off).
I’ve not written anything in a while for a few reasons, chief among them is I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole and have been binge watching The Great British Baking Show. I don’t cook or bake, never will, but if you need to discuss the nuances of Swiss or Italian meringue, soggy bottom pastry or why you need a mirror glaze on your chocolate fondants, I am very surprisingly up to the task. Binge watching TGBBS is going much better than last fall when I binge watched the entire series of Criminal Minds IN THREE WEEKS which so messed with my head that I started wondering if I might secretly be a sociopath but people were just too nice to mention it. I took it to such lengths that I asked at least 5 people if they thought I was, in fact, a sociopath, including my therapist. It was an unusual session and she actually laughed out loud when I asked her, which was an enormous relief.
So far in this blog, I’ve written about two people: Marsha and myself. Today I’m writing about someone else. I’ll do my best to keep out identifying details. Let’s just call her Grace because it’s one of her favorite words.
If you want someone to encourage you, Grace is the person you want in your life. If you want someone who can tell you hard truth in a way that motivates you to do things differently, you want Grace. If you want someone who cares about you beyond your job description (yep, she was my boss once upon a time), again, Grace.
Grace has the gift of making the mundane extraordinarily fun. At the beginning of every year, she decides on a theme for the upcoming year and launches it at an all staff meeting and literally screams the theme with decorations, music, snacks, swag, the whole nine yards. Maddeningly, it is kept super super secret squirrel until the launch and I’m not embarrassed to tell you I’ve lost sleep in my life over the mystery theme out of sheer excitement. One year there was no theme, no decor, no swag, lame snacks and I was so horrified I thought I was going to ugly cry in front of the entire staff. Happily it was a smokescreen and within five minutes all was revealed and it was MAGICAL and yes, I squealed with delight. Grace, if you’re reading this, just know those were the most shocking five minutes of my entire life. *pointed look*.
If you have a scattered squirrel of an idea (I am the scattert-est of squirrels), Grace is the person you want to tell and she will help you turn it into a realistic plan. She’ll also give you “the look” if your idea is absurd like the time someone (not me, I swear) asked why we couldn’t have a Starbucks on campus.
I’ve known Grace for 19 years and I worked for her for 14. The first couple of months I was working for her, my work with children was on point but paperwork (things like turning in lesson plans, keeping track of things) was decidedly not. She came into my classroom one morning and there was a stack of stuff in my teacher corner that was SO HIGH, she was visibly startled. All she said was, “you might want to tidy that up” instead of screaming at me for having the leaning tower of paper and God knows what else in plain sight. And instead of leaving me in the cold wilderness of Mount Paper, she connected me with a mentor who helped me get organized and do strange and weirdly wonderful things like make labels for things and put items in their proper place.
There are so many times in my life I’ve slunk into her office for no particular reason except the fact that I like to chat and she is pro-chat, provided there isn’t something extremely urgent going on. She is the type of person I like best: interesting and interested, reflective and has a sense of humor that appreciates my own warped one.
I sometimes what it must be like for Grace; caring so much about so many people and things and giving grace to others and being kind and understanding, in all ways, always. I know for a fact there were multiple times she was just so over me for some reason or another but she believed in me still and offered me kindness instead of a well deserved bawling out and *that* is what made me want to do things better because really, who among us does well with shame?
Grace, thank you. For so many reasons. You mean so much to so many.
P.S. I recently went through my office closet and found some excellent resource books that I obviously borrowed and never returned, so if you could throw some Grace my way and grant me library amnesty, I’ll be happy to return them sometime in 2021. I seem to recall a staff meeting where you asked if people would please check to see if they had any resource books because many were missing. “How awful!”, I thought. Well, it was me, alllll me. You probably knew it, too. It was not theft, it was forgetfulness. Again.
When my mom was expecting me, she prayed that if she had a daughter, please would that daughter have long, thick hair. This is not a secret; she continues to tell people (anyone who will listen, including the cashier at Walgreens) to this day. God and nature delivered on that prayer but it took a little time.
By all (photographic) accounts, I was born with sparse, very, very dark hair. Think of it: a girl baby with male pattern baldness. All that was lacking was an actual combover. My mom has never said anything about her initial reaction to that but I can imagine she was…bummed. There are quite a few pictures of my infant self in actual bonnets and I suspect they were less of a fashion choice and more to disguise my lack of hair. Sometimes I wonder if mom expected me to arrive with actual pigtails. And bows.
Around the 6 month mark, the sparse black hair fell out and my parents were left with a bald baby. If baby bow headbands had been a thing, I’m confident I would have been in several at a time, even while in my crib. It’s entirely probable my mom taped a sign on me that read, “she’s a girl”.
Around age 1ish, God was like, “Oh. Right. Her hair”. It came in quickly and thickly. And there was much rejoicing. By age four, I had more hair (on my head) than a Shetland pony and every morning my mom would fix my hair, which involved her brushing my hair and pulling it back into all manner of braids, And trust me, when I say pulled back, it was pulled waaaaay back. I looked like a 4 year old who had recently had Botox injections and had a faintly surprised look on my face all the time because my eyebrows were frozen in place and couldn’t furrow my brow. I’m reasonably confident I’m the only child who remembers having her hair in hot rollers at age 4. I’m not lying; there are multiple pictures of me in rollers. Inevitably one roller would touch the back of my ear. I would yelp and mom would tuck a piece of toilet paper between my ear and the roller which was both relieving and disturbing.
One morning Mom was brushing my hair and it was very tangly because she had put Dippity – Do (don’t ask) in it the day before. We were both cranky that morning and she smacked the hairbrush on the counter. It broke in half and part of it ricocheted off the counter against the wall. It was an exciting start to our day.
My hair is sneaky. It looks like a regular amount of hair because the texture is what is called “fine” but what lies underneath is quite a bit to deal with and also why I tip generously. Whenever I cheat on my regular stylist (something I do a lot; I’m not proud of it), I always tell them my hair is thick and long and will need extra time. I give fair warning and full disclosure. They dismiss me entirely of course but once they get me in the shampoo bowl, I can see it in their face. They realize what they’ve signed up for and the phrase is always the exact same, “wow, you have a lot of hair.” And they don’t mean it as a compliment. It’s almost accusatory as they attempt to thoroughly wet my hair with the inferior nozzle. Minutes pass, I close my eyes and wait for the inevitable wetting of the back of my shirt as they desperately try to soak all the hair.
Then the shampooing. One, two, three pumps; never enough, the canopy is barely sudsy. Then they get aggressive and scrub and dig in. Fortunately, I am (as a result of being heavily styled in my early years), not at all tender headed. Shampoo one is complete and the water drains before shampoo two commences and then the conditioner. I have never NOT had a stylist say multiple times during the whole process, “you have a lot of hair, wow, so much hair.” I always wonder what they say to people who have sparse hair. Do they say, “wow, you don’t have much hair, it’s so great you don’t have a lot of hair?” All I know that if it is a busy day at the salon, 5 or 6 customers can be washed and off to the chair while I am still in the basin with a neck ache.
Then they give me that horrible hand towel sized rag and try to wrap me up in it. I politely ask for a few more because I feel like I’ve been in a rainstorm and water is freaking all over me. I never plan anything after a haircut; I always walk out with my shirt damp in very patchy areas. It’s not attractive and definitely not a time to wear a white tee shirt or anything that could become remotely transparent. A black tee shirt is always the best bet, always.
Frequently stylists will suggest thinning my hair out with thinning shears. I tried it once and it was terrible: I looked like a very hairy chia pet who was sprouting hair randomly.
I’m not one to prepare for holidays early (except for Christmas, my most favorite; I start prepping mid October and will Fa-La-La-La you to death) and now that it’s officially Pumpkin Spice Season, I think it’s perfectly fine to discuss Halloween in the Olden Days – not super olden, more recent olden, when I was a kid.)
In my whole trick or treating life, I was never a character or something like a Rubik’s cube. All I wanted was something fairy princess like, jewelry and make up. Also a tiara. One year I won a contest for the fairy princess costume my mom made me: so much tulle with silver fringe, a beautiful tiara, rhinestone dangly earrings and yes, make up. Best Day Ever.
One year I was a belly dancer and a freaking cold front came through and I was forced to wear my coat (I unzipped it as soon as I was out of sight). It was an unfortunate situation; I’m still salty about it.
We all know that with trick or treating comes candy. It’s literally the point of trick or treating. I had very strong opinions on Best, Acceptable and Terrible Candy, categorized as follows:
*List Is Not Comprehensive*
Best:
Reese’s anything
Snickers
Candy Corn
Kit Kat
Smarties
Wax Lips filled with the sweet, sweet nectar and harmful Red Dye
Hershey’s miniatures (but not Special Dark)
Payday
Acceptable:
M&M’s (great for trading)
Those off brand orange and black wax paper wrapped faux peanut butter things
Hershey’s Kisses
Lifesavers
Gum (also a great trade item)
Milky Way
Bit O’ Honey
Terrible:
Tootsie Rolls: they always looked like poo to me; I refused to even try them
Unwrapped candy (was not allowed to eat it)
APPLES (the nerve!!)
Black Licorice Anything
Lollipops: impossible to trade, like having counterfeit money
And now for the Best In Show/Worst In Show:
BEST: The families that handed out full size anything.
WORST: A dentist persisted in handing out toothbrushes every year. Nice people but way off base when it came to Halloween. We had to thank everyone, regardless of the loot. I did always say thank you but didn’t mean it in my heart and had zero guilt over my faked gratitude.
Once Trick or Treating ended, we were allowed to stay up unbelievably late and do a big trade with the neighborhood kids and eat basically all the candy we wanted to. I always went to school the next day with a sugar hangover and low spirits because the party was literally over and had stayed up 10 hours past bedtime and was cranky all day.
Also:
After October 31, our loot was stored on top of the fridge and we could have a couple of pieces a day (but not within an hour of dinner).
I’m no math magician but can definitively say the Mom Tax is real because my loot level dropped much faster than I was consuming and once I caught Marsha with her head in the laundry room, M&M’s in her cheeks puffed out like a hamster’s and she tried to pass it off as a cracker. She reeked of chocolate and it was also within an hour of dinner.
Alert: Before I published this, I made sure I had my mom’s permission…
By all accounts, my mom is a kind and loving person, with a healthy dose of snark. I can count only a handful of times she yelled at us and this was one of those days.
When my brother and I were young (7ish/4ish, respectively), there was a cup we fought over the right to drink from. It was a cheap plastic red cup – the only thing that made it special (aside from there being only one in the house) was that it had a built in straw and that straw had been gnawed on by both of us to the point that very little liquid could be drawn from it. We were drawn to that cup like moths to a flame: we NEEDED to drink from that cup and we started every breakfast by arguing over whose turn it was to drink out of that horrible red cup. . Nothing was quite as satisfying as slurping orange juice from The Red Cup while your sibling suffered and drank from the Hamburgler cup we got that one time from McDonalds.
For a period of time, we kept track of whose turn it was (but argued over it daily, just to keep in practice). My mom took that responsibility over and started announcing whose turn it was, probably to keep the morning drama to a minimum so she could deposit us at school and get on with her day, restore her calm and do selfish things like take a bath, laundry and make a phone call without two children invading her space within two seconds of her even glancing at the phone.
We called it, “The Red Cup”. It was more precious to us than actual money. So precious, in fact, that my mom stored it in the medicine cupboard (Dimetapp, Baby Aspirin , Triamenic) high above the kitchen sink. Out. Of. Reach. Off. Limits. Over. Our. Heads. But never out of our minds.
One morning, mom forgot to announce whose turn it was. My brother and I, excited about this loophole, this unexpected, once in a lifetime opportunity, bickered spiritedly at the table while my mom, an actual saint, made us letter shaped pancakes while The Three Stooges were on the black and white tv and The Two Stooges (my brother and I), presented our cases with the dedication of two attorneys.
Of course things came to a head. It was inevitable. It was early in the morning and my mom had already had it with us for some reason or another. In an act of pure Mom Glory, she flung open the medicine cupboard, snatched the Red Cup, set it firmly (really firmly, it made a sharp, attention-getting snapping sound) on the counter and yelled, “SH*T HOUSE MOUSE!” and left the kitchen.
My brother and I were instantly silent. Such a thing had never happened. And the choice of words was brilliant. So many questions about the mouse and its living situation. Mom was out of the kitchen and we were left to eat our Golden Grahams cereal appetizer, alone and in shock.
Of course she didn’t leave the house. I suspect she went into the half bath to think about her badly behaved children and gather her wits.
She wasn’t gone long. Maybe 4-5 minutes. She came back and was calm. Kind but firm. She asked us if we were going to have any more problems that day and even though it was a question, she didn’t want any feedback. It was a Mom Statement phrased in question format. We. Were. Not. Going. To. Have. Any. More. Problems. That. Day.
It was a quiet breakfast and a quiet ride to school. My brother and I were overly kind to each other. No bickering, very polite cocktail party conversation. I remember that he complimented my coat and I asked how his Playmobile collection was coming along.
When mom dropped us off, she told us she loved us very much, have a good day and that we were going to have a good afternoon. And we did. We went to Pumpkin Park after school and had ice cream. My mom was always incapable of sending us off to school without telling us she loved us.
Sh*t house mouse is family lore now and it is hilarious. I will never forget the snapping sound of The Red Cup on the kitchen counter.
I am most definitely a morning person. If the early bird catching the worm was a thing for humans, I’d have a heckuva lot of worms. But I wasn’t always a morning person…getting up in time to get ready for work used to be an actual miracle. I finally changed my ways but it took a lot of fails to get me up in the morning. One of those fails was trying “unique” alarm clocks.
There was an ad in a magazine for a “never fail” alarm clock. Of course I ordered it immediately because: impulse control issues. And when it arrived, I tore open the box and 3 broken fingernails later…the alarm clock was before me: a plastic hen, sitting on a nest of eggs, with the alarm clock attached beneath the nest. I’ve never before or since set something up so quickly. Excited is an understatement: my life was about to be changed for the better; I was elated. I probably checked the alarm setting 15 times. I went to bed that night with a happy and hopeful heart.
The next morning, at 5:45, I woke up to the sound of that plastic hen clucking right in my ear. It was loud and I thought I was having a dream about living on a farm. But no. It was that d*mn hen, cluck clucking away. In a frightened stupor, I reached out to swat it. And that’s when things got really busy. The nest tipped forward and a dozen or so plastic eggs rolled over my bedroom. That was the idea: clucking to wake you and then the activity of gathering eggs to get you out of bed.
I scrambled out of bed with Mother Hen clucking away. I started frantically gathering eggs; they were everywhere. At one point, I gathered the bottom of my pajama top into a pouch and was stashing the eggs in them. I was talking to Mother Hen the entire time: “I’m working on it!”, “I’m coming! I’m COMING!!!”, “Bear with me!”, “Please STOP!”, “This is rude, YOU are rude!” and some unrepeatable words peppered in between.
Finally I gathered all the eggs in my makeshift marsupial pouch and dumped them in the nest.
But the clucking continued. Evidently I was missing an egg or two and Mother Hen knew it. I got up wearily to find the missing eggs. It was like an egg hunt in hell, to be honest. At one point, I put my head on my dresser and just yelled. I was living in an apartment at the time and I can only imagine what my neighbors thought: a crazy lady upstairs had fowls and was verbally abusing them.
Finally, I reached my limit. I reached under my nightstand, yanked the plug out of the wall and stomped across the filthy parking lot IN MY BARE FEET and flung the hen into the dumpster.
When I got back to my apartment, I was sweaty, disoriented, with tears of fury rolling down my cheeks. I looked at the soles my feet. They were the color of tar. I knew in that moment that I simply could not work that day.
I made the call to let them know. I didn’t say I was sick. I said, “I am too mad to come to work today.” But didn’t say it calmly; I essentially screeched into the phone, my voice scaling up on the “too mad” part. I was on the edge of insanity. The woman asked me what was wrong and I explained. To her credit, she did not laugh or try and convince me to come in. She said, “My God. Yes. Stay home and we’ll see you tomorrow.” I did stay at home and I was frazzled most of the day; wondering why I thought buying that alarm clock was a good idea.
Driving in Reverse 