There was a heavy sigh. “Dude,” My Honey began, “move your plate closer to you.”

“It is,” the Bandit insisted.

“No it isn’t. If your plate was closer to you then you wouldn’t have food all over the clean tablecloth.”

I took a sip from my glass and tried to stay out of it.

“What difference does it make?” the Bandit asked. “The tablecloth’s already dirty.” Ooooh, the Bandit was playing fast and loose with his bed time.

Uh oh. My Honey’s eyes were getting rounder. The Bandit really should be watching for warning signs. “It wasn’t dirty when I put it on the table. Ten minutes ago.”

My son speared a noodle and some sauce covered meat with his fork directly off the table cloth. I think I actually heard his father’s teeth grinding. I avoided eye contact. Sassy was oblivious. She was concentrating on separating the casserole into different categories: veggies, noodles and evil meat.

“Dude, you’re like a pig.”

The Bandit shrugged. “That’s how I roll.”

And then he spilled his milk.

I promised you the story that clearly outlines while I write humor. Because my life is a bumbling hodgepodge of humiliations. All I can say is, thank Zeus I find it all funny or I’d never stop crying.

I have been very paranoid about my face breaking out during the Tucson Festival of Books. For some reason I cannot fathom, now that I’m in my 40’s my face has started breaking out way worse than it ever did while I was a teenager. There is nothing fair about it, but there’s also nothing that can really be done except wash it and use Retin-A – which I did like a maniac for the week leading up to the festival. I did not want a giant, swollen zit on my chin just in time for me to spend a weekend with famous authors I respect, nor did I want a pimple winking at the audience of my workshop panel on Sunday.

I took the last two days off from the Bank of No Forks last week to get everything ready for the Festival. Wednesday night I was up until about midnight stuffing 500 give-away bags and finally went to bed because I started feeling ill.  It turns out Kelli and I and our good friend Leigh all got sick when we took Leigh to lunch for her birthday. Ava escaped the Italian Death Sentence by going to Albuquerque. So that meant I was up all night, in and out of the bathroom, expressing misery and a will to die.

Around 5:00am I heard My Honey make his lunch and leave the house for work. Immediately after the front door closed I heard rustling in the kitchen – a sure sign Roscoe the Idiot Dog was stealing the bread My Honey must have left out on the counter. I cursed soundly and whipped the covers off the bed, determined to catch the little bastard in the act.

Remember it was only 5am so the house was dark as I snuck down the hall in stocking feet. I could see Roscoe’s shape in the living room, hunched over the bread bag, the plastic crinkling in the darkness. I slunk right up behind him and yelled, “Hey!” really loud.

The moral of this story is that you can, indeed, sneak up on and scare the bejesus out of a bloodhound – especially if said hound is concentrating really hard on something naughty. One wouldn’t think so, what with the ridiculously powerful sense of smell they possess, but I assure you it is possible.

Roscoe jumped straight up in the air, whirled around snarling at the obvious intruder, and bit me. On the nose.

I am not proud to say my first reaction was to whop him on the head with the closest thing at hand – a pink Hello Kitty lap desk of my daughter’s. The minute Roscoe realized it was me, he was mortified but by then I was already in the bathroom mopping up the blood of which there was a lot. Did you know your face bleeds a lot? It does. I’m here to tell you.

I called My Honey on his cell phone, “This is not your fault, but I’m totally blaming you!”

So I entered into the long weekend with crystal clear skin, not a blemish in sight. However, my nose has two gashes, a bruise and a bit of swelling.

That my friends, is why I write comedy.