Dead Woman Walking

You see before you - or read before you, anyway - the wreck of what was once a woman.

I swear, it's the one drawback to getting old. I quite enjoy being my age (if for no other reason that it is now really easy to pull age rank on people and blather on about "When I was your age" - well, until they throw things at me, anyway) except for the party factor. I don't know what it is, but I just can't party the way I used to when I was 25. Wait. That's wrong. I CAN still party that way - it just takes a LOT longer to recover.

My child Sarah threw a terrific birthday party for me on Saturday night with a whole bunch of my favorite people and neat things to eat (made by Sarah - I have trained the Grasshopper well) for which I didn't have to do a damn thing except put on some makeup and look pretty and drink humongous amounts of beer until nearly 5 am - and it was GREAT. Hey, I even made it up that damn spiral staircase to my bed all alone. Admittedly, I sat down to take my clothes off and promptly passed out cold (still dressed), but hell, I didn't fall down the stairs, now did I? I call that a victory.

Of course we all crammed into the kitchen. Now I have a really, really large, high ceilinged living room - but somehow, the best part of any party goes on in the kitchen, and so it was on Saturday. Great conversations and great food - what more does one want in a party? It was terrific.

And then came Sunday. I woke up at about 8 to go to the bathroom (good morning, beer!) and decided that was the worst idea I ever had in my life (waking up, I mean - going to the bathroom was a truly EXCELLENT idea) and went back to sleep until around noon. Then I got up and went downstairs and had a bagel and started to read the Sunday papers until I discovered that I was dozing off with my head in the NYTimes Styles section. At which point I went back to bed until about 6 pm, and THEN got up, read the papers and ate something. At that, I did better than Sarah, whom I didn't lay eyes on all day - I know that Joshua brought her up some food the girls had made about 10:30 pm, but visible she was not.

And today I went to work, which was a terrible mistake - the curse of temping is that there's no such thing as sick days. Also I was sitting next to an extremely annoying woman. I've been sitting there for a few days, and she keeps getting more annoying. Today (what with still being hung over and all), I wanted to grab her by the neck and shake her. She leaps on phones like a hungry vulture on a nice dead body - meaning that the phones I'm supposed to be answering are jumped on - which sounds pretty idiotic until you remember that I don't actually HAVE anything to do but answer the damn phones and it breaks up the monotony a little. (I let it ring twice and then pick up...she won't let it get to the second ring, thereby annoying the lawyers who need the first ring to get their eyes off the computer, for God's sake.) Today she had to type about six or eight cover letters for bills, and the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that went on was truly alarming. Cover letters for bills are identical. You type one, save, and then keep copying it. Six or eight of them can be easily done in about 20 minutes. Well, with this gal, she had to call the help desk because there was something she couldn't figure out, then she had to ask me to type the labels for them...and she fed me the addresses for the labels one at a time about every twenty minutes, presumably under the impression that I needed LOTS of time for this activity. Presumably she felt this way because it took her a good four hours to do six or eight three line letters. Growl. I can't live with this sort of thing with a lingering hangover.

Then I got home and my life turned into some sort of bizarre slapstick comedy routine. I opened the front door and found that I couldn't get into my house because our tall wooden ladder was blocking my entry. Since I was extremely eager to get to a nice cold restorative beer, I failed to notice this soon enough, and sent said ladder crashing to the floor - luckily not toward me. Then Mel came and moved the ladder, and I attempted to get into the house only to get myself tangled up with a shopping cart that was in the same general vicinity. Then I tripped over something else...and all this to find that the girls were working on the kitchen floor and had my table dismantled again, meaning that I couldn't sit in the kitchen. GROWL!

You have to understand that I am like a spider, and my kitchen table is the center of my web. My house is on various levels, and the kitchen sits about four steps up from the living room, so that sitting at my seat, I can survey my domain, check out who's coming in the door, monitor everything, etc., etc., and so forth. It's MY SPOT. I get very twitchy with no kitchen table. However, Mel and Rebecca put it back together for me, bless them, and I was able to finish my evening in peace and quiet.

Oh, and the reason the ladder was blocking my entrance to begin with is that Joshua is hysterically paranoid, and thinks that the immediate world is attempting to gain entrance to our house to commit some sort of mayhem. They were using mineral spirits or some damn thing to get the leftover glue off the kitchen floor and had the front door open because of the fumes, so Joshua immediately became consumed with the notion that "THEY" might try and get in the house. Ergo, I was blockaded at my own front door. How friggin' silly can you get? If I were a bad guy, and I saw an open door that looked promising, I'd take a look inside, see three able bodied people working ten feet away, one of whom is a butch bull dyke and one of whom is a very well muscled six foot tall man, and go in the other direction. I mean, really. How damn silly can you get? Joshua's paranoia is also the reason that I can't get any light in the living room, because he insists that the curtains be closed at all times because people are looking in the window. People are indeed stopping in front of our little complex because it's gorgeous, but they're not staring in our window - if for no other reason that I have nice white sheer curtains that let light through but block any kind of view inside. But this doesn't satisfy Joshua who, if he had his way, would have iron gates on the windows. Sheesh.

I'm going to bed to continue my recovery. But it was a great party!

Love, Wendy