I should have known it would be "one of those days" when I got up this morning....
I, and daughter #3, decided last night we would have a little "sleep over" at my place (which means she slept with me in my bed after we watched a movie that scared us both) AND that we would "sleep in" which to her means waking at noon and for me means getting up after my internal alarm goes off and I hit the snooze button 6 or 7 times (don’t ask).
ANYWAY, I’d made it from 5:45 (when I first woke up and looked at the clock) to 7:00 (the last time I remember looking at the clock) when I heard someone knocking on the door. In any normal neighborhood this would be no cause for alarm....the neighbor might want sugar for their coffee, or the paperboy might want paid for the paper he sometimes delivers on time.
In my neighborhood, however, a knock on the door at 7:00 a.m. can only mean one thing...... well, maybe two things....either someone is lost, (I live in the country and have a 1/4 mile long driveway through dense woods ..... sometimes mistaken for Lover’s Lane by college students) OR it’s a burglar checking to see if we’re home before he breaks in.
Since I’m in my nightgown, my hair is a mess, and I have no makeup on I figure I’ll take my chances on scaring the burglar as bad as he’s scared me and I head downstairs.
I was only half right.....the burglar turns out to be the telephone company (I do, at times, feel they are crooks!) who are doing their duty and coming "promptly" to bury the new phone line they put in TWO months ago after the original model was chewed by some woodland creature who was apparently NOT a particularly picky eater. I did succeed in scaring the poor man half to death (you’d think he’d never seen a woman in an oversized blue t-shirt, black socks and flip flops before!)
After trapsing around the "slightly" overgrown yard, .....what’s that saying about knee high by the fourth of July?.....Oh, I think that may be for corn.....anyhooooo.......he tells me the message he got says he’s to follow the paint lines to trench in the new phone line. Well, why didn't you just say so?..................................Funny......there’s all of a sudden more paint in that yard than you can shake a stick at. We find blue lines, red dots, flourescent orange arrows and something that could either be brown paint or.......something we don’t want to imagine.
I finally resort to telling a "white lie" and go inside to "consult" with my husband (who, as it happens is
not upstairs, but is in Montana right now on a forest fire). Thank goodness he had his cell phone and the two hour time difference didn’t seem to bother him.......thanks honey,......oh, it’s the
BLUE line we follow.
The dear little men finish their appointed task and leave so I take advantage of the still relatively cool temperature of 77 (this is July in Indiana! oh, I guess it's probably July where you live too huh? Tee Hee Hee) to go to the garage and exercise. I manage to work up a good sweat in only 15 minutes and am halfway through an episode of "Small Spaces, Big Style" when the electricity goes off.....(bummer 45 minutes to go and no treadmill......also no TV).
I try to plod along on the old fashioned eliptical machine which requires no electricity (only batteries for the display) but find it somewhat inconvenient to not be able to see my hand in front of my face, or do anything but listen to my own panting for diversion. I make it 15 minutes and give up to go outside and walk the driveway for 30 minutes.
During the first 5 minutes I’m attacked by a mother bird who mistakes me for some kind of threat so I end up jogging, ...though not fast enough to elude the deerflies, which of course I’m allergic to (one manages to bite me right behind my left ear ....I now look like I have a case of the mumps), but plenty fast enough to miss seeing tree roots which I swear seem to jump up out of nowhere ...... a 50 year old woman can break a hip with a fall like that!!! I give up and decide to go home.....
After a boring hour and a half in the dark (did I mention we live in a dense woods....it won’t be light in our house until roughly 1:00 p.m. when the sun is directly overhead) I’ve managed to cook two eggs for myself on the barbecue (another don’t ask) , read the remaining 60 pages of my book club book by half light while sitting on the floor by the patio doors, knitted two rows of Afton’s project (I hope she doesn’t notice....she hates it when I do that), and used up all the ice we had trying to reduce the baseball now looming from the left side of my head.
In total frustration I decide to call the electric company to see when the electricity will be back on, it’s been off since just after 8:00 and I’m dying here! Luckily I have a cell phone as obviously the phone won’t work without electricity (Drat!) Unluckily, we get poor reception in our "little cabin the dense woods" (we have a signal booster in the house but guess what......it works on electricity).
I find I can almost get a signal upstairs, so I rightly assume higher is better, and climb on the file cabinet in the loft to make my call.....Miss Helpful at the electric company tells me the electricity will soon be restored, it’s only a temporary outage while they install a traffic light . In her sweetest voice she tells me it should be restored by ll:30 a.m. and asks if there is anything else she can do for me......(probably sensing my distress when I start sobbing).....it’s only 9:10!
I'm going back to bed and when I wake up it had better be tomorrow!!!!
(Oh, and a side note....I STILL CAN'T UPLOAD PICTURES TO BLOGGER!!!!! AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!)
New "Toto"model basket arrives for my bike, along with speedometer to gauge my success in terms of distance and speed! Day one finds me making a 10 mile ride to the hardware store to save gas.....and amazingly enough I made it!!!
