I was crouched down in the hall using an unwound paperclip to fiddle with the bathroom doorknob. Someone had locked the door, but no one was inside. Of course, both children implied the other one had locked the door from the outside. It didn’t really matter who did it, I just needed in there.

I cursed when the stupid paperclip bent again and I was denied access. I stood up and stared at the locked door.  All right, what did I really need in there for? We have another bathroom, but it’s the scary “boys” bathroom. The 2^nd bathroom has a shower, but none of my stuff is in there so I couldn’t wash my hair or face. Well, maybe I could forgo the shower for this morning.  I glanced at my hair in the mirror in my bedroom.  Surprisingly, it wasn’t too bad, which was a damn good thing because the hair implements are behind the locked door.  I would have access to no hairspray or gel, blow dryer or curling iron.  I supposed if I looked around the house, I would find a hair tie or two.

I continued to stare at the locked door.  I debated removing the doorknob all together but that seemed rather excessive since I knew My Honey would be able to unlock the door when he got home tonight.

Crap. My toothbrush and deodorant were in there.  That was bad. I have a spare toothbrush at work and some deodorant as well. I guessed I’d just resist breathing on anyone until I got to work and could perform some basic toiletries.

I jiggled the knob again.  Nope.  No spontaneous unlocking had occurred.

My makeup was behind the door. I would have to resign myself to going to work with no shower, odd hair (nothing new there really) and no makeup except the mascara left over from yesterday.

“Whatcha doin’?” The Bandit asked strolling down the hall brandishing a Prince of Persia sword.

“Coming to grips with my life.” I sighed and let my shoulders droop in defeat.

“You want in there?” he asked, nonchalant.

“Yes.” I bent and peered hopelessly into the tiny hole in the knob that confounded me so. The Bandit reappeared at my side.  I hadn’t even noticed he’d left. He held a very skinny screwdriver in his little fist.

“I’ll do it,” he said and pushed me aside.

I looked at him skeptically and breathed a heavy sigh. I glanced at the dog sleeping in the hall and hated him for a moment because he didn’t worry about silly things like cleanliness and fresh breath.

No less than three seconds later, The Bandit swung the door open, a satisfied grin on his face. “There you go. No problem, Mom.”

I blinked at the light streaming out of the bathroom. I didn’t know what to say. How does a mother comment when faced with her six year old son’s lock picking expertise?

“Why can’t you remember to flush the toilet when you use it?”

The Sister’s are feeling sullen. All three of us at the same time.  This probably isn’t good for the world as a whole and definitely not good for the happy, smiley, nauseatingly Sesame Street store greeter type people that seem to populate our world.

I’ve decided I just don’t want to talk to people anymore.  This isn’t good considering my job requires me to listen to people and express empathy for their tough financial situations. Apparently, I’m a consummate actress because my customer evaluations always come back glowing. We also resent clerks in stores offering to help us and we resent them when they are invisible. There is no winning with us. We resent the slackers at The Church (Barnes & Noble’s instore Starbucks) who hog all the tables when we meet there for coffee, yummies and bitching. Don’t these freakin people have jobs? We could go on forever listing the people who irritate us but after a while that would get irritating.

I don’t know if our problem is that it’s been a ridiculously long, hot summer or our general malaise with our chosen professions.  Perhaps it’s because there is no diet in this world that works and we’re all deathly tired of salad. Maybe it’s because, since we haven’t won the lottery, we lost Greece when the rest of Europe decided to bail them out.  We have hopes for Italy or Spain – specifically Italy.  We contemplated whether or not to allow the Pope to stay in Vatican City, but we think not. I plan to put my bed directly under Michelangelo’s masterpiece.

However our problem began, it’s escalated into a dire situation indeed.  I suggested today that we get shirts that read:

My son was nicknamed The Bandit for a reason.  Beyond a doubt my son is the mastermind behind any devious adventures either at school or at home. At this point, of course, all his misdeeds are minor,funny and blog worthy. But the boy is a consummate liar and soon that won’t be so funny.

At the age of six the things he chooses to lie about are minimal, but the way he does it is worthy of a mob interrogation.

For example, his father came upon the boy standing on the stove and leaning into the highest shelves of the open pantry.  “What are you doing?” he asked The Bandit. Of course, Daddy had a pretty clear idea what was going on.

The boy didn’t jump or look guilty, he just glanced at his father. “Nothing,” he said with a straight face. 

“What’cha got in your hand there?” Daddy motions to the box of cookies Bandit has in his hands.

“Nothin’.”

“Really,” Daddy tilts his head and raises his eyebrows to indicate disbelief. “I see you holding the cookies.”

“No, I’m not.”

Daddy scoffs, loudly. “Dude, I’m looking at you.  I can see you.”

Again with the straight face. “I was counting the cookies.”

“Counting them?” Daddy nods in disbelief. “Looks to me like you were eating them.”

Bandit purses his lips together, scrunching up his chin, and just shakes his head just like Al Pacino in Scarface. “No.”

“You’ve got chocolate all over your face, man, I can see it.”

Then in a move that would make Gotti proud, he says to his father, “I don’t have chocolate on my face.”

If he gets any better at this, I suspect the CIA is going to come calling.

You can follow the link to the review I posted this week at examiner.com.  Just click on the book cover if you’re into that sort of thing.

We loaded up the covered wagon and went to the Costco so we could spend two hundred dollars on enormous quantities of stuff.  We wandered passed the frozen food aisles where all the best samples are.  We roamed through the bakery and inhaled the cookies and lemon cakes. Where the muffins ended the produce began. I sniffed the nectarines and squeezed the avacados and then I saw the stupidest, politically correct nonsense yet.

Do you recall several years ago when some moron at some New York ad agency decided the prunes should be renamed “dried plums” because “prunes” sounded old and un-yummy.

Yeah.  That’s just stupid.  These were probably the same people who suggested North Dakota should change it’s name because “North” Dakota just sounded too cold. What did they think was a better option? North Florida? Asinine.

Anyway.  I flat out refuse to call prunes “dried plums”. It’s dumb.

And just when I thought Madison Avenue couldn’t be more idiotic, I saw this in the produce department.

So now we have “Fresh Prunes”?

WTF, people.  WTF?

I gave Sassy her own email address this summer.  She’s changing schools and I wanted her to be able to stay in touch with her friends. She also emails her grandmothers and a few other people.

She has asked me repeatedly for the last several days if I received an email from her.  I finally found it in an email account I hadn’t expected.  Here is our exchange.

Subject: Hi mom

Hi mom I thought that I would let you know that I need a raise in my allowance!
LOve Bug xoxoxoxoxoxoxxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxooxoxoxooxoxox

Subject: re: Hi mom

I found your email.  Allowance? What allowance?  I’ve never heard of it.
Love Mom

Why do you suppose she sent this via email? I can only suppose she wanted official record of her written request.

I suspect her next step will be a subpoena.

Our zoo just announced the lioness just gave birth to three cubs. The Sisters are very, very excited about this, but we do have some concerns.  Our zoo lately hasn’t had the best run of luck.  In the last year, we’ve lost one very elderly lion, one young polar bear who died from complications in surgery, and most recently one young giraffe with another giraffe surviving by the skin of her teeth.

That the lioness was “possibly” pregnant was mentioned almost as an after thought in one of the update news articles about the ailing giraffe. It was mentioned that they “thought” she might be pregnant but they didn’t know for sure.  They didn’t know for sure? What? Can’t they make that lioness pee on a stick or something?

MSNBC noted that Kaya gave birth to three lion cubs on July 28, last Thursday.  They couldn’t tell she was pregnant and she was carrying three cubs? I’m kind of concerned about where they got their zoology degrees – Brookline College? Cracker Jack?

Ava, Kelli and I have decided that we need to go get these precious babies and protect them from the zoo.  There are three cubs and three Sisters.  It’s like it was meant to be.

We have a plan. Obviously we’re not going to tell you what it is.  You’ll probably learn about it on the news though.  I want Brooke Shields to play me in the made for TV movie.

The keys to our plan are big purses, plausible deniability, and daring.  We’re fairly sure we can convince Ava’s husband to go along if only to see if we can do it. My Honey probably will go along because quite frankly the entire escape sounds like great fun. Kelli’s husband will probably initially balk at the idea but I think we can brow beat him into it if we give him a fun job. We may enter through the elephant enclosure.  Ava and I figure if we wear gray the elephants won’t even recognize us as humans.

“Shabala, when did we get new elephants?”

“I don’t know, Connie, but they look like fun.”

You know that’s what they’ll be rumbling to each other in that nifty elephant way they have.

We’re not too concerned about how young the cubs are.  We’re confident we can foster the little dears.  Hell, you can get anything off the internet. We’ll just have to up our number of weekly trips to the Price Club.

This is going to be great.

It was such a slow day that Ava and I gathered together several others and played Scrabble today.  Isn’t that a sad commentary?

I loathe Scrabble. In fact, loathe may not be a strong enough word to accurately describe my feelings towards Scrabble. Being a writer and borderline obsessive reader who acknowledges a rather elephantine vocabulary and splendid spelling skills, one would think I’d be pretty good at Scrabble – a game that applies both skills. My play is merely passable and, with my competitive nature, that is not sufficient for my tastes.  I also have a very immature tendency to not further my interest in subjects in which I don’t prove to be immediately proficient.  I offer up billiards as a perfect example. My father taught me to play – left handed – which should give me an advantage, and sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.  I’m not consistent and I don’t shoot pool often enough to become consistently good at it, thus I choose to rarely play.  I dislike losing enough to not risk a possible win. Infantile, right?

I blame my mother for my abhorrence of Scrabble.  She always wins. She not only wins, she creams me every single time.  I have never, ever won a game of Scrabble with her. I usually don’t even come close to her score and it’s demoralizing. Every time she convinces me to lose a game to her, I make her play a game of Trivial Pursuit to soothe my feathers.

I don’t know how I got roped into the game today, except that I was just that bored.  It didn’t start out well. Right from the beginning there was an argument over rules.  That’s a problem with playing games like Scrabble or Monopoly with people outside your own immediate family.  You have to sort through what rules are legitimate and which are “house rules” your family has played with so long you assume they are the true rules of the game.

After that prickly negotiation where tiles were thrown and harsh words spoken, I was called back to the game after storming off.  Yes, I stormed off. I’m embarrassed to admit it.

There was another incident later in the game where I threw the lid of the box. I know it was a ridiculous response but, to be fair, Ava was taunting me like we were 5 and 10 years old. Quite frankly, unless Ava is on your team, I don’t recommend playing a game with her.  She accused me of blatant cheating but, truth be told, the reason we wouldn’t allow her to keep score is because her cheating has been well documented.  

My only consolation is that I won.  Without cheating, I’d like to point out. And without physically assaulting Ava – but it was touch and go there for a while.

This is the kind of story where you laugh until you snort, but you feel guilty about it the whole time.

In fact, just writing this post is making me giggle, but I am chagrined.

I got a message on my cell phone to call my father so he could tell me about how he almost killed his dog today. This does not sound like an auspicious start to a funny blog, does it? Just hang in there.  The payout is good.

So you know those cartoons where someone is in an elevator and, at the very last moment before the doors slide shut, their dog runs out leaving them holding the leash.  In next panel, the dog will be hanging from the leash stuck at the top of the closed doors.

Apparently, that really happens.

My father, who had a stroke a year and a half ago, took his dog, Delbert, for a walk today.  Because he’s still wobbly on bad days, he takes the elevator quite a bit to avoid tumbling down the stairs.  His family truly appreciates that he does this. 

Dad and Delbert hopped on the elevator after their morning walk and the stupid dog darted out just as the doors closed. In a panic, my dad started pushing buttons but he couldn’t get the doors to open or the elevator to stop until the third floor.

Ack!

Dad raced down the length of the hall and down the three flights of stairs. He took a spill on the sidewalk as he whipped around the corner to wobble his way back to the elevator to rescue the dog.

Now here is where you shouldn’t laugh, but you will and I’ll forgive you, dear reader.

Imagine my father, a 72 year old man with wild Albert Einstein hair and a pot belly, wearing slippers (he’s always wearing his “house shoes”) and an obnoxious t-shirt with a slogan like, “Who Farted?”  His running gait would have been sort of goofy and lopey, like a new born colt. I’m also certain he would have been hollering at the considerable top of his lungs, “Hold on, Delby! Hold on boy.  Poppa’s coming.”

You also shouldn’t assume that the above description is only relevant because of his stroke.  While he is a considerably different man since the incident, dignity has never been one of his strong suits.

“The look on Delbert’s face was classic,” Dad told me. “He was like, ‘Finally. Thank God you’re back. What the hell took you so long?’”

He found Delbert literally dangling from the top of the closed elevator by his collar, his leash threaded through the doors.

The maintenance guy had to come and retrieve the leash.

And Dad wonders why we don’t let him watch our kids.