The Keezlenutten funny farm

On our trip to the Shenandoah Valley recently, we were interested in going horseback riding. Or at least, I was interested; Joe was just sort of along for the ride, so to speak.

"I hope they don't give me a pony," I said more than once. "When I was younger and went horseback riding, they always gave me a pony, and everyone else had grown-up horses."

Joe looked at my short stature and elected, wisely, not to say anything. He's very smart for a man who's been married less than two years.

So we looked at the horseback riding brochure given to us by the helpful tourist information lady ("There's a bicycle tour coming through town this morning -- they'll ride 37 laps around the town, you won't want to miss it! EVERYONE comes out to see it every year!"). There were plenty of ranches to choose from, but we quickly narrowed it down to three based on a very important criterion: how interesting the name of the ranch was. The first one was the Elkton Poultry Farm, which at first glance does not seem especially amusing, until you remember that we wanted to ride horses, not chickens. We speculated on how large these particular chickens might be to take on riders. But it appeared that the ranch did indeed offer horses as an alternative, and even billed itself as "a B & B for horses: Just bring their food and we'll do all the pampering."

"It sounds nice," I said. "Maybe we could stay there."

"Yeah, I'll bet they get fresh towels every morning," Joe said sourly. He was still sore from having to track down our B & B proprietor that morning in an effort to get some new towels. We had clearly indicated our desire for new towels by placing the old ones over the shower stall, as suggested by the helpful sign in our room, but they were still there when we had returned that night. Perhaps the current proprietor had never read the sign.

"Plus, I'll bet it's cheaper to stay there than where we're staying," Joe said.

"You have to bring your own food, though," I pointed out. "And they're probably strict about what you can bring -- some variant of oat or something."

So we passed on to number 2 on our list of ranches: Mountaintop Riding Ranch. Joe liked this one because it implied that we would see sweeping vistas as we rode at a contented, leisurely trot on our gentle steeds. But when he called the number listed, he was told that it was disconnected. "Well," he said, "they probably overadvertised with that name, anyway."

"Maybe they had one too many guests go over the edge of the mountaintop," I suggested. (Guide 1 to Guide 2: "I TOLD you St. Jude wasn't ready to be a guest horse yet!")

And so we came to number 3: the Keezlenutten Farm Trail Rides. We had high hopes for this one, with a name like that. On our arrival we got out of the car and eagerly looked over the horses in the paddock. (I'm not sure that's really where they were, but that's the only horse term I know.) They didn't look all that promising. Several were lying down (don't horses sleep standing up?), and as we watched, several others fell over, like someone had just sprinkled sleeping dust on them. We were relieved when our guides -- two girls who looked to be all of 14 -- told us our horses were on the other side of the road, all saddled and ready to go.

Joe rode Hopi (an ancient Indian name meaning "Small Bladder"), who stopped no less than four times to go to the bathroom. The rest of us waited with varying degrees of patience for these potty breaks to end. Joe thought that perhaps he was unknowingly putting pressure on one of Hopi's strategic internal structures, if you get my drift, and he spent most of the ride shifting his weight around in an effort to relieve this pressure.

Afterward, Hopi displayed a little playfulness and started butting my horse, Copper. Whereupon Copper, who was indeed a full-grown horse, would stop abruptly and look behind. I guess horses, like humans, can give "looks that kill," although it took more than one to make Hopi back off.

"Copper is really smart," one of the guides told me proudly. But a smart horse is not really what you want when you haven't been on a horse in 10 years. What you're looking for is one that doesn't think for himself, that just follows the horse's butt in front of him. Smart horses don't like to play by the rules. They like to go left when the other horses go right, step squarely in the middle of a muddy rut when all the others step gingerly around it, and turn in circles for no apparent reason -- all of which my horse did, with total disregard for my frantic tugging on the reins.

Copper had a penchant for walking right into little trees, knowing he was bigger than they were and he could do whatever he wanted with them. Apparently his keen sense of space, however, did not include the rider atop him, and I made contact with more trees than I really cared to.

There was also a brief little incident of terror near the end of the ride when Copper, knowing we were nearing the ranch again, broke into what seemed like a full gallop but which the guide assured me was only a "rolling trot." I was glad to get back on the ground, which thankfully did not roll, although the backs of my thighs were screaming in pain. Before we took our leave, I stroked Copper and told him, in the type of soothing voice our guides had assured us the horses liked, "I'll get you next time, buddy-o."

Harvey and the chicken bag

Back in my teaching days, it was a challenge getting all the kids herded out the door at the end of the day. On one particularly trying day, Harvey, an adorable little black boy, started crying. He didn't have a backpack like the rest of the kids to put his papers in that he was taking home. Nothing I did placated him. "I want a bag!" he wailed.

In desperation I grabbed a plastic grocery bag and showed it to him. "Look, Harvey, here's a bag. It's a chicken bag! You can have a chicken bag!" I turned the bag so he could see the chicken on it. As chickens go, it wasn't particularly attractive, but I had nothing else to offer. My assistant snorted and rolled her eyes. "Like THAT'S gonna work," she said.

But Harvey stopped crying. He looked at the chicken. He looked at me. I gave him an encouraging nod. And he pulled the bag open so he could put all his papers in it. I said a prayer of thanks and sent a triumphant look toward my assistant.

"I have a chicken bag!" Harvey said happily as he carried it out to the bus. He hung on to that chicken bag the rest of the year, filling it up with papers and artwork at the end of every day, and every morning bringing it back from home. I wouldn't be surprised to know he slept with it.

It just goes to show that you can sell anything if you market it right. It also shows that there are unintended consequences for everything. I had done such a good job selling Harvey on the chicken bag that all the other kids wanted one, too -- even those who had the coolest backpacks they had begged their mothers for. I had a hard time keeping the room fully stocked with chicken bags. I prayed daily that the grocery store would never change its bags. When I went shopping, I had to ask the bagger to put each item in a separate bag so I could collect enough bags. It wasn't exactly environmentally smart, but in a contest between the environment and 10 wailing children, which would you pick?

Exceeding our expectations

Businesses are getting militant about customer satisfaction. It's no longer good enough that their customers are satisfied. They want to know if you are exceedingly satisfied. They are not giving you any better service, necessarily, but they expect you to be happier with it. And they do not give you the option of feeling anything less.

For instance, at the bank one day, the teller completed my transaction in a fairly straightforward manner, which is to say she smiled and nodded on my arrival, punched a bunch of numbers in, and handed me my slip. Just as I was putting everything away and about to leave, she said, in a voice that indicated she expected me to say yes, "Did I exceed your expectations today?"

She did not even look at me when she said this, which indicates how much she either (a) cared about what I would answer or (b) was confident that I would say yes. I just stared at her. Exceed my expectations? Maybe if she'd given me, say, the key to the vault and told me to help myself to the contents, then yes, I would say she had exceeded my expectations. But for just doing her job? I thought it was a silly question, and upon reflection decided it deserved a silly answer.

"I don't know that I had any when I came in here," I said.

She looked up, startled. Clearly this answer was not in the Things the Customer Is Supposed to Say handbook. "What?"

"Expectations," I said. "I'm not sure I had any when I came in." I left while she was still trying to figure out what to say to that. Hopefully I spared the next customer the question.

The company who makes my cereal proclaims that I will be "delighted" with their product. "At Health Valley, we are passionate about quality. If you are not delighted with this product, please call or write our Customer Satisfaction Team," who will no doubt tell you to buzz off. Anyway, how delighted can you be with a product that contains more grams of fiber than sugar?

Someone from Honda calls occasionally to do a customer satisfaction survey. They always say, in a confident voice, "Would you rate your experience as 'excellent'?" Normally I just say yes to keep the peace. They're happy I said yes, I'm happy the conversation is over.

But one day I didn't just say yes. "What are my other choices?" I asked the confident voice.

"I beg your pardon?" the voice said.

"What are my other choices besides 'excellent'?" I repeated. "My other Honda dealer used to give free candy bars with an oil change. That would be nice. Maybe then I could say the service was excellent."

"I'll...I'll see what I can do about that," the voice stammered.

"The really big candy bars," I said helpfully, "the king-size ones, not those little puny things people give out at Halloween."

"Plain or peanut?" the voice asked sarcastically.

"Oh --" I started to answer, but the voice was gone.

That definitely did not rate an 'excellent.'

A hairy battle

There is an ongoing animosity between me and the barber who cuts my husband's hair, whom I shall call "Joan," mainly because I don't know what her real name is. It's probably just as well, because I might be tempted to track her down at her private residence and tell her what I think of her hair-cutting skills, which is this: "Find another line of work, 'Joan.' " Not that my skills in this area are any better, but then I don't go around hacking people's hair and extorting them for it.

Joe tells me that she is prone to discuss politics as she cuts his hair, which could explain a lot. Can't you go to someone who's apolitical? I ask him. But convenience, for him, trumps quality, and so it is a useless battle I wage to get him to go somewhere else. There must be any number of better qualified barbers in the city, but "Joan" has one thing they do not -- a shop right down the street from Joe's office.

I started noticing -- it was hard not to -- odd things when he would get his hair cut. Things like one of his sideburns being significantly shorter than the other. "She's a Republican," Joe said by way of explanation. "The elections didn't make her too happy." And the back of his hairline, which when left to its own devices forms a perfect "V," would still show, after a visit to "Joan," a perfect V. "Tell her to cut that straight across, for goodness' sake," I said. "What is she thinking?"

His hair is thick, and she didn't thin it out until I started telling him to tell her to thin it out. And to cut it shorter on top so it didn't look like she had, during a tirade against Nancy Pelosi, forgotten all about cutting the top. "Why are we paying her?" I wanted to know.

At first, "Joan" took my interference in her livelihood pretty well. I would tell Joe what to tell her, and she would dutifully carry out my instructions, although Joe said she would give him a long look before starting in. But something set her off. It could have been -- though I am not certain -- my admittedly clumsy attempt to shave the back of his neck in between cuttings. The shaver accidentally foraged into his hairline, with the result that I had to spend considerable time fixing the damage with scissors, pliers, glue, etc. The next time he went to "Joan," she looked at the back of his neck, pursed her lips, and said, "Your wife is a Democrat, isn't she?"

"Uh, no, actually, um -- ouch!" Joe said.

"Joan" pointed her scissors threateningly at his reflection in the mirror. "Well, tell her to leave this area alone."

You can imagine that I did not take kindly to being told not to interfere in my own husband's hairline. "If she did her job right, I wouldn't have to fix it," I said indignantly.

And thus started our escalating animosity. It has progressed to sending notes back and forth, which Joe dutifully bears like a child caught in a dispute between parent and teacher, a dispute in which he is totally innocent. Except for the fact that he keeps going to "Joan."

Three thumbs up for Netflix

Thank goodness for Netflix. If you don't know what Netflix is, you probably (a) don't watch movies much or (b) are not married. Netflix has been one of those small but important things, like dual-control electric blankets, that has saved our weekend nights. We used to spend a good portion of those nights at Blockbuster, trying to agree on a movie. Knowing we were in for a long night (even before watching the movie), I'd bring along hot chocolate, make popcorn, set up the Foreman grill, etc. (inadvertently attracting other customers: "Oooh, free samples?"). And then we would begin The Hunt for the Perfect Movie. By the end of the night, I would be ready to settle for The Movie That Does Not Make Me Throw Up.

He'd see a movie called "A Very Long Engagement" and remark, "Oh, look, someone made a movie about us." Whereupon we would start a lively discussion of why it had taken him so long to ask me to marry him, with him countering that once he had, I had dragged out the process so long that coworkers started taking bets on whether he would indeed get married. At which time I would promptly leave the romantic comedy section and head for the drama section, particularly the movies where wives plot to inflict severe injury on their husbands' person.

Meanwhile, in the new release section, he would say, "Hey, this sounds good" and hand something to me to read, but before I had gotten through the first sentence of the synopsis he'd find another one. "Or this one -- yeah, this one definitely looks better." I never had time to read a synopsis in its entirety, the result being that the snippets I read all merged into one movie: "Chaos reigns at the natural history museum, where the swashbuckling Captain Jack Sparrow, a struggling single parent determined to make life better for brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, battles dinosaurs and with the help of a beautiful penguin, is evicted from his apartment amid fears of a disastrous tidal wave that could wipe out an undefeated high school basketball team..."

After the first few times of this I took to following him around, looking only at the movies he expressed an interest in and giving my hearty approval to such gems as "Grave of the Fireflies" and "Cowboy Bebop." At this point I did not care what we watched; I wanted only to escape before the next hit came out and was on the shelves and he had yet another decision to make.

And so when he told me about Netflix and how they send movies right to your door, without your having to set foot in an actual rental place, I knelt down and kissed the ground. Now our movie disagreements are restricted to battling for better placement in the online queue of our respective movie choices. And fighting over who gets the electric blanket while we watch the movie.

Getting away from it all

Everyone wants to get away from it all, but when they do go away, they take it all with them. Along with the shorts, t-shirts, and sunscreen, they pack their Blackberries, laptops, important files, underwater fax machines, etc. They are just as accessible on vacation as they are at the office.

“This is great!” they say. “Now I won’t miss anything.”

But, in fact, they miss everything. They’re out on the ocean, on a whale watching tour, but they don’t see the whales because they are talking on the phone, lurching from one side of the boat to the other in an effort to get a better signal. Or they’re touring the great castles of Europe, cursing the builders for their ludicrous choice of location in the mountains, where one cannot easily find a fax machine.

In a hot air balloon, a guy is talking on his cell phone, missing the great view, when suddenly a bird swoops down and carries the phone off, mistaking it for—well, something more edible than a phone. And the people in the next balloon, who are gazing contentedly out over the valley, are suddenly startled by a bird landing on their basket and saying, “Lou? Are you there? I can’t hear you! Lou! Answer me!”

Americans take fewer vacations than workers in other countries. Is it any wonder? They just don’t come back relaxed when they do, so why bother? In fact, maybe companies should establish “Vacation Rooms,” where employees could hang out during their vacation time. The rooms would be onsite, so if anything came up they could just walk over to the office. There could even be a “Family Vacation Room,” with theme activities for the kids, games, 3-d movies of places they’ve always wanted to visit. People would be much more relaxed in the Vacation Room than on an actual vacation. And they wouldn’t have to pack anything—everything they needed would be right there.

Except the postcards.

Mawwied?

“Are you mawwied?” The question came out of the blue from the back seat of my SUV, where two five-year-olds and a toddler were en route to Chuck E. Cheese’s while their parents enjoyed some time for Christmas shopping. Being, at the time, unmarried, I told the questioner, a waifish girl, “No, I’m not married.”

“Oh,” she stated. “You’re a mom, just not mawwied.”

“Well, do I have any kids?” I asked her.

She thought. “No,” she said, “but you’re still a mom, just not mawwied.” She said it with complete confidence and authority. Clearly, a “mom” to Paige was any adult female, whether or not she was encumbered with children, diaper bags, minivan, and husband.

“Well,” I countered, “maybe I’m just a kid. A big kid.”

Now the other five-year-old piped up. “Yep, that’s it---she’s a kid.” She sounded relieved, as if it hadn’t sounded quite right that I was a mom, not mawwied, but she hadn’t known what else to suggest.

But Paige scoffed at this idea. “Not a kid! You’re a mom.” Which might have settled it, had Autumn bought into her reasoning. Clearly she did not.

“She can’t be a mom. She’s a kid, like us, only big.”

And hereupon began the Argument of My Status. I watched in the mirror as the two girls crossed their arms and dug in for what looked to be a long legal battle.

“Kid,” stated Autumn with a shake of her head for emphasis.

“No, a mom, just not mawwied,” Paige explained patiently. She, at least, was willing to work with Autumn until the latter admitted Paige was right.

“Kid.” More firmly now.

Here Paige abandoned all pretense of trying to reason. “Mom, not mawwied.”

“Kid.”

“Mom, not mawwied.”

Their voices rose.

“KID.”

“Mom, not MAWWIED.”

“Kid.”

This might have gone on all the way to Chuck E. Cheese’s, but another thought abruptly occurred to Paige. “Hey, maybe her husband died.” The pathos of this idea appealed to Autumn. “Yeah, and her kids, too,” she said. There was a moment of silence in the back seat, as if they were honoring the memory of my dear departed family. But they could not mourn for long. One announced an appropriate ending for this sad chain of events in my life:

“And then SHE died!”

And they both dissolved into hysterical laughter.

Until the toddler said quietly, “Mawwied?”

Busy

What with one thing and another, I see no blog entries have written themselves this week. Funny how that works. Forced, through no fault of my own, to work for a living, I have had to pay more attention than I really care to to that activity this week. I apologize to my three fans -- which includes my husband, who knows what's good for him -- for the lack of material this week. I could, I suppose, write on how we awoke this morning to find that the front door had blown open of its own accord sometime during the night (which explains why the furnace would not shut off and it reached like 98 degrees upstairs), and I'm sure given enough time and distance I will find something funny about this, but right now I can only think of all the four- and eight-footed critters who might have gained unlawful entry. Not to mention the two-footed ones. Or I could write about my husband's attempt to help his mother, who is a neophyte to computers, open an e-mail account, but now that she is online and able to access this blog perhaps that is better left to everyone's imagination. Let's just say that this phone conversation started last evening and by the time it was over, she was still e-mailless and said she'd better hang up before it was time for Joe to go to work. And alas, now it is time for me to go to work.

A cooling frenzy

My husband and I have become obsessed with coolers. We have coolers for short trips, coolers for long trips, and a cooler for going to Target, where it comes in handy for holding water and snacks to tide us over while we drive around trying to find a parking spot. When we were house hunting, we would pack drinks, snacks, dishes, napkins, books, wine, the Foreman grill, etc. "No one told me we were going on a picnic," our agent would say when he arrived to pick us up. "Never mind that," I said. "Do you have somewhere in your car we can plug this grill in?"

Last summer Joe took the cooler obsession to new heights. And depths. And widths. He decided we needed a Beach Cooler. We have a beach cooler, I reminded him. No, no, he said. That one doesn't hold enough. We always run out of bottled water with that puny thing. And it can only fit little snack bags.

I didn't see anything wrong with this. I like little snack bags.

But he had grander visions. The cooler must be big, he said. Big enough to hold -- he searched for a vision of what he wanted it to hold -- a watermelon! Yes! A whole watermelon! And other fruits! Pineapple! Papaya! Wouldn't that be refreshing!

I personally thought it sounded more slimy than refreshing, but there was no deterring him from his quest.

And a quest it became. My husband, who researches everything with the thoroughness of one who is investing his life's savings, dropped everything to search for the perfect beach cooler. He read online reviews. He surveyed friends and coworkers about their coolers and whether they were happy with them ("Can it fit a watermelon?"). Armed with this information, he went out to buy the Beach Cooler. Unfortunately, it was near the end of the season, and he had to poke around the rakes and snow shovels to find something suitable. Not being a big shopper, he is not familiar with the time-honored store tradition of stocking winter items in July. Several nights he came home discouraged, but he pressed on.

Finally he brought one home. "What do you think"? he said, both anxiously and proudly, as if showing off a prized flower he had cultivated. "It's not as big as I wanted," he said apologetically. "But it can still hold a small watermelon plus other stuff!" I stared at it, this hunk of plastic that could hold a neighborhood's worth of watermelon. Why the two of us needed to take a cooler the size of New Mexico to the beach, I had no idea. And since it was for the beach, it had no wheels, which meant that we had to carry it the old-fashioned way, rendering it impractical to take anywhere else. We used it once, prompting me to mutter dark threats about his personal safety, but Joe assured me that we would use it much more next summer.

But now he has a new grill, a small portable "Son of Hibachi" ("It's self-cleaning!"), and his grand vision this summer is to take both the cooler and the grill to the beach and have cookouts. "That sounds like a lot of work," I said, ever the one to encourage him in his quests. "But we won't have to leave the beach to go eat!" he said cheerfully.

"You can enjoy sharing your dinner with the seagulls," I said. "I'm going to get a hot dog that doesn't have any sand in it."

Flooring idiosyncracies

My husband and I have achieved the American Dream: We have a house full of hardwood floors. America right now is in love with hardwood floors. It is easy to see why. They look cool and come in almost as many colors as carpeting. You can start at one end of the room, get a running start, and slide to the other end. And if you have an old house with floors that slant, as ours do, at roughly a 45-degree angle, you can roll in your chair across the room to the TV, turn on a light, get a book, even slide into the kitchen to get something from the refrigerator, all without leaving your chair. Of course, you always have to go in the same direction.

So I understand why hardwood floors are all the rage. What I do not understand is why people spend the equivalent of their children's college education to have their floors installed or refinished, for which they have to move out of their home temporarily, and then the first thing they do when they move back in -- after saying "WHAT is that SMELL???!!!" -- is to plop down a rug that completely covers the new floor. And presto -- all the advantages of hardwood floors vanish under a rug that is a fraction of what the floors cost. In addition, they have just made their cleaning tasks much harder, and isn't that also touted as one of the advantages of hardwood floors? They are sooo much easier to care for than carpet. No more vacuuming! Just once around with the Swiffer, and you can enjoy the rest of your week! Tie the Swiffers to the rollers on your chair and roll your way to a clean floor! Well, what do they do now that there is a rug on top of the floor? They can't Swiffer it. They can't dust-mop it. They have to vacuum it. But they can't, because they sold the vacuum on Craigslist.

Another so-called advantage of floors over carpet is that they are cleaner and healthier. No trapped dirt! No dust to cause allergies! If you want to see a dust producer, get hardwood floors. They turn dust bunnies into dust Tyrannosaurus Rexes. And hardwood floors + rug = even more dust.

Our floors came with cleaning restrictions. Of course. We had to promise the guy who refinished them for us, in a 10-page legal document, which we had to sign, that we would never, ever use commercial cleaning products on our floors. Not even a Wet Swiffer -- oh! Wet Swiffers are the WORST! They will eat your floor. And especially nothing with lemon, orange, peach, grape, banana, raisin, etc. Pretty much anything that's good for you is bad for your floor.

The only approved mixture for cleaning our floors is water and vinegar. Nothing you can conveniently buy in a bottle and easily mop on. And nothing that will make the house smell like spring. More like rotting eggs. We can't even use dry Swiffers -- which ARE approved, however -- because the charming irregularities of our 160-year-old floors, like nails sticking up, catch little tufts of Swiffer, and after you are done the room looks like a field full of dandelion fluff.

So, although we love the look of our floors, we can't quite agree that they make our life easier. But then, who said the American Dream was easy?

Advertising for friends

Since I'm approaching 40, and since it's a documented fact that although people don't make many new friends after 40 (see March 5), friends are vital to one's health as one gets even older than 40 -- just like so many other things in life, as your need goes up, the supply decreases -- I've been trying to think of new ways to make friends. Why not advertise for them? I thought. People advertise for all sorts of things, some of which are better left unmentioned. The problem with many of these ads, though, is that people are not honest. They make themselves out to sound so wonderful that you wonder why they had to take out an ad in the first place ("tall, unbelievably gorgeous, gourmet cook, rescues women and cats from burning buildings," etc.). Let's get real. Wouldn't it save everyone time and effort and disappointment if people were just honest up front? "No, I wouldn't risk my life to get your cat out of your apartment building if it were on fire." Then you'd know never to leave your cat alone with that person and a box of matches.

So I'm thinking it would make more sense to advertise what you're not, so people don't get the wrong idea (and so you don't get the wrong friends). For instance, this might be a useful sort of ad:

"Is not particularly tall, attractive, or talented. Hates cleaning. Hates sewing, quilting, anything involving needles or eye-hand manipulation. Can't stand morning cheeriness. Hates mindless chit-chat as well as deep, probing conversations forcing one to bare one's soul (moderation in everything). Allergic to outdoor activities requiring exertion and intimate contact with nature. Abhors trying new foods, especially ones that are good for you or that come from a country with a high rate of unskilled labor. Strongly disapproves of doing anything on own that someone else could be paid to do. Suspicious of learning new skills or hobbies. Shudders at the thought of being forced to look through phone-book-sized albums of grandchildren or pets. Speaking of pets, hates those too unless they are self-sufficient, including cleaning up after themselves. Scorns Daytimers, PDAs, and scheduling calendars with little "Reminder!" and "Appointment!" stickers. Strongly disapproves of wallpaper.

If you have any of these interests, please answer someone else's ad."

Vacuum cleaners

Do you know how many people each year are maimed or killed by vacuum cleaners? Neither do I, but I'll bet it's a lot. It probably, and I am just taking a wild guess here, surpasses all other causes of injury and death put together, including plague, war, etc.

The attachments on upright vacuums are useless. You have to pull the tube out so far to reach anything that you pull the vacuum over on top of you. And then, as you are flailing and thrashing and trying to right yourself and the vacuum, the vacuum is sucking up everything in the room, including the walls.

But vacuums also have a mind of their own. Open the closet door to take the machine out to use it, and it just plows right over you, eagerly searching for dirt. A cord that wasn't there a minute before suddenly makes you trip. Or the vacuum quietly wraps its cord around a floor lamp, waiting for just the right moment when you stretch the cord too far before it yanks on the lamp and brings it crashing down on you. Someday, after my death, someone is going to say, "How did she die, officer?" "Well, it appears the vacuum cleaner knocked her out and pinned her to the floor." And that will be the end of me. Done in by 20 pounds of plastic.

Waiting for The Big Fight

"Have we ever had a Big Fight?" I asked my husband one evening.

"Well," he said tentatively, "there was that issue about the house for sale on Marcie Ct. that you liked..."

"Oh, that," I said. "I was a little upset, yes, but..."

"Yeah, I guess it wasn't really a fight," he agreed hastily.

We looked at each other. "Uh, oh," I said. "That means The Big Fight is coming."

We huddled under the computer desk in case The Big Fight decided to burst in on us right then and there. Perhaps we could just wait it out, let It rage around us.

"What do you think It will look like?" I whispered. "Maybe if we're prepared for It, It won't be so bad."

But he had no ideas to offer. "We'll just have to wait and see."

People think that "Prepare to die" are the three most frightening words. "Wait and see" are far worse.

"Maybe we should give It some chocolate," I said. "You know, put It in a good mood."

Being a man, he didn't think there was any merit in the chocolate suggestion. He keeps trying to tell me that chocolate doesn't solve everything. I tell him he should be very thankful to the person who discovered chocolate, because he would be pretty miserable if I didn't have my chocolate.

"I think we should just take It head on, show It we're not afraid of a little confrontation," he said confidently.

I thought it likely that It would be more than "a little confrontation," but I didn't say anything.

I noticed he was taking up more than his fair share under the desk. "Hey," I said, "move over. You're taking up too much space."

"I am not," he said. "Besides, you take all the covers at night."

"That's not my fault!" I said heatedly. "You --"

"Shhhh!" he whispered urgently. "I hear It coming!"

I had heard it too. I clutched him and then we sat as still as we could. We heard a confusing, static-y sound, as if thoughts were swirling angrily in Its head and It was searching for voices to let the thoughts out, but It didn't come any closer. Pretty soon we heard It receding.

We let out our breath. "Whew!" he said. "That was close!"

The Big Fight still hasn't come, but when It does, we'll be ready for It.