Hunt it Down
Before eight o’clock that morning…
“Mom! Crackers is eating the playdough!”
Then I caught Puck climbing trees in my Picaso wellies. I wouldn’t mind, except that he’s OLeif’s son, the son of the man who tears holes in new jeans and shoes after thirty minutes of wear. Puck is right behind him.
But anyway, my sweet elite Hollywood skills were required for another stab-run at Carrie’s and Lucia’s Youtube promotional weekly intro once again. So I grabbed my case of 800 carat diamond necklaces, pet purse-sized live baby elephant, French tutor, pink champagne, and hit the private jet before ten.
Or whatever.
Lucia, who had gotten herself out of jury duty the previous morning – when filming had been originally scheduled – was, indeed, present. Carrie was almost done flattening my hair and spicing up the corners of my eyes, which rarely see anything darker than a pale afternoon shadow.
“Wow, you look so much younger,” blonde-Linnea stared at me. “You look like you could be 17.”
Immediately, scales pop in my head…
17…
Twenty minutes in front of the mirror… every day…
17…
Twenty minutes… every day…
Plus the inevitable kick in the shin that once I start wearing more make-up than a paper-thin centimeter, people will really think I look older than 17 next time I don’t have those twenty minutes and a mirror.
17 isn’t look quite as Eden-apple to me.
We actually ended up at the Silverspoon’s for 90 minutes to crank things off with a “blank canvas” as Carrie put it, right around the time the Geek Squad was also making a visit for repairs in the basement. Gloria was happy to loan her freshly painted walls and untracked hardwood floors for the morning.
An hour later, even Carrie wanted some Taco Bell. We waited an abnormal amount of time in the drive-through and finally slinked up to the window where a woman took Joe’s cassette tape image credit card.
“She likes you, Joe,” Lucia whispered from the back seat. “You should try to get her digits.”
Joe just groaned.
When we finally called it a wrap right before five, Lucia found a coffee fix necessary. Carrie chose her respite in the form of a fresh Krispy Kreme Hallowe’en rap. And Puck and I dodged home around light traffic after The Bear informed me of the possibility of a sinus infection.
Never a normal day.
Not really.
Thought of the Day
Sometimes you can’t disguise the fact that things happen that you don’t like to see or deal with. The Bear’s headaches, Puck getting sick twice in three weeks, even something you might construe sometimes as being “silly”, like the Cards losing a critical post-season game. Maybe it’s actually something far worse, morally speaking. Maybe you see something terrible on the news or hear a story about how someone died in a freak accident. And it sort of “ruins your day”. And maybe it helps to remember that day by focusing on the better things that happened. Maybe you look back at October 16th, 2012, and you’d prefer not to remember that sermon you listened to about abortion or how The Bear probably needs x-rays on his back to figure out why it hurts so much. But the point is, if you block out everything horrible and disgusting or even just annoying, you forget how the Creator uses even those minor rough spots, like the little circles in scratch ‘n sniff books from the 80’s, to clear things up, to make them better, to make you better. And completely forgetting about them makes you think they only happened to make your life more difficult, or that the good things must be just cold, hard, luck.