I’ll just tell you right now that if you’re prone to jealousy then you may just want to click away from what is sure to be a fascinating tale of how we spent the last weekend of September.
We ate Mexican food.
I had a cold.
C played soccer.
I’m sorry to make it all seem so glamorous and thrilling but it is what it is.
To make it even worse I’ll go ahead and confess now that I also cleaned our toilets.
If you can set aside your envy for a few minutes, I’ll share all the details.
Last Thursday I was positive I was coming down with the cold/virus/plague that Caroline and P had a few days earlier, but my body never really committed to it. I had the scratchy throat, the congestion and the fatigue but avoided the fever. And after a generous dose of Benadryl on Thursday night, I woke up Friday morning feeling significantly better. Which worked out because I had accidentally committed myself to spending the entire day at Caroline’s school.
She was on the morning announcements and so I drove her to school and stayed to watch. Then I’d promised her teacher that I’d make copies of the worksheets she’d need for this week’s lesson plan. However, I am not skilled in the copy-making process because, let’s face it, I went to school in the age of mimeograph sheets. (Shout out to the smell of a freshly mimeographed worksheet. Top 5 smell ever.) And in recent years I have largely avoided making copies whenever possible, especially anything that involved one-sided copies to two-sided copies or what have you. I mean, what am I? A rocket scientist?
(I’m not even exaggerating when I tell you I had to go to Kinko’s a few months ago to get something laminated and broke out in a dead sweat because I was so intimidated by the laminating machine.)
So I made 75 copies of a packet that consisted of at least ten pages and then proceeded to begin the laborious process of stapling them BY HAND before Caroline’s sweet math teacher happened to stop by, noticed that I’m an idiot who can’t be trusted with grown up tasks, and showed me that the copier has the capacity to not only collate these copies but to also staple them. It’s like I was a monkey at NASA. I had no idea.
Needless to say I spent the better part of ninety minutes sorting and stapling all these packets due to my lack of copier comprehension and finally finished just in time to leave the school and go pick up lunch for Caroline because I’d promised I’d eat lunch with her on Friday earlier in the week. I sat and watched her enjoy her BLT sandwich from Subway (I can’t really talk about the Subway bacon. It just doesn’t seem like it’s a color found in nature, but she finds it tasty.) and then drove back home for thirty minutes until it was time to meet her at the Book Fair in the school library. So it was basically an all-day affair for me at the elementary school on Friday and by the time I picked up Caroline and we drove home I felt like the cold/virus/plague was really beginning to set in. Or it could have just been psychosomatic because I’d spent all that time in the petri dish known as elementary school.
But we went to eat Mexican food with Mimi and Bops because I’m not one to let a scratchy throat stand in the way of chips and salsa. P had left town earlier in the day to go to a friend’s ranch for a big bachelor party weekend. And when I say big bachelor party weekend I’m sure it might bring to mind all manner of possible shenanigans, so let me just tell you that, when P called me to check in on Saturday night (at 9:00 p.m.) and I asked what they were doing, he said “Watching videos of Kate and Avery waterskiing.” Kate and Avery are the six and four-year-old daughters of one of the bachelor party hosts. Clearly this bachelor party was like something out of that old Tom Hanks movie. Rumor has it they even stayed up until almost 10:30.
Anyway, P did drive back in town for a few hours on Saturday to watch Caroline’s soccer game. It started on time but two strikes of lightning right by the field caused everyone to scurry like it was the apocalypse and the game got delayed for forty-five minutes until the storm passed. The refs finally signaled it was all clear and the girls could resume play. The game started again right as the sky opened up and it poured down rain. But there was no lightning or thunder so we all sat in the driving rain and watched the girls play. I have never had so many regrets about having my purse with me. The good news is that I think pleather can handle inclement weather.
After P left for the ranch again, Caroline and I headed over to Gulley’s house to watch the Aggies play Arkansas and eat pork ribs because what else would you eat when you’re playing against the Hogs?. (Sadly this same strategy doesn’t work when you’re playing the SMU Mustangs or the Vanderbilt Commodores because I hear both horse and navy officers are tough and chewy.) I’d been nervous about the game all day and watching it didn’t make me feel any better. I was glad to see the Aggies get out of there with a win. I don’t know what to think of our defense but something tells me our defensive coordinator isn’t planning to contact me for a consultation so I really can’t worry about it.
But I obviously went to bed with football on my mind. That combined with a generous dose of Mucinex Max Strength cough medicine caused me to have weird dreams all night long, especially the one where I was watching some guys paint their chests for a football game and realized they’d spelled a word wrong but it was too late to tell them.
I know exactly where this dream originated because a few weeks ago I was watching Texas Tech play and they flashed to a group of guys in the stands who spelled out “T-E-H”. The “C” was missing. Or they didn’t know how to spell TECH. I’m not sure which.
But I really can’t judge because until Friday morning I wasn’t aware that copiers were capable of stapling documents.