Oh, what a weekend we had over here.

Mimi and Bops picked up Caroline on Friday afternoon and I headed straight to the mall because my birthday money was burning a hole in my pocket. Oh sure, I could save it, but why would I do that?

I was halfway to the mall when I remembered that it was tax-free weekend in Texas which translates to MASS CHAOS.

But because I am a fool for shopping, I decided to brave the crowds and take advantage of tax-free savings. I’m not going to lie, I barely made it out alive.

I limped out of the mall in need of fresh air and a weapon of mass destruction. The good news is that my foray into the bowels of hell paid off because I found a really cute pea coat, which is hard to get excited about in the dead of August but will be delightful in January.

Earlier that afternoon, I noticed I had a small rash on my chest. It was slightly itchy and red, but I decided it was a heat rash from all of our beach fun. No big deal.

P and I picked up barbecue for dinner that evening because everyone knows that pork ribs are the traditional celebratory meal for an eleventh wedding anniversary. As we sat at the coffee table, eating our dinner and watching the Olympics, (who says romance is dead?) I began to feel a little itchy behind my knees. And on my arms. And on my back.

I went to look at myself in the mirror and I screamed in horror. Actually, I’m not sure I screamed, but I did mumble a quiet, “What the heck?”

It was not pretty, my friends. Not pretty at all.

So I popped a Zyrtec or six and went to bed in the hopes of sleeping off my rash.

I woke up Saturday morning at 11:00 with a major antihistamine hangover. I kept splashing my face with water and trying to rub my eyes, but everything remained foggy. It was just like I was back in college after a night of too much Zima.

The irony is that I sold Zyrtec for years and always assured physicians that it shouldn’t make their patients sleepy and that it was much more tolerable than Benadryl. And, technically, that is true for 87% of the population.

However, I fall into the other 13%. It knocks girlfriend STRAIGHT OUT.

In fact, when P and I used to take 75 high school kids skiing every Spring Break and had to ride a bus for 17 hours, I would always take a Zyrtec so that I could sleep the entire way.

And then I’d take several more throughout the trip to drown out all the teen angst.

If you are the parent of someone who went on one of these trips, I’m sure someone else was watching your kid. I’m also 87% sure that none of them ever snuck out at night while I was in a comatose state.

Anyway, about my rash.

It continued to spread. I spent most of Saturday coating myself with hydrocortisone and popping any antihistamine I could find in the medicine cabinet.

I’m here to tell you that there is not a more romantic way to spend your eleventh wedding anniversary than all drugged up and slathered in hydrocortisone. That is HOT with a capital H.

I’d use my most alluring voice to say, “Hey baby, why don’t you come over here and put some of that Benadryl lotion on the backs of my knees?”

And for some reason, probably fear of contamination, he turned me down.

I believe the vows say IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH.

I finally decided that I contracted some sort of beach rash from all that moat-digging. P thought maybe I was allergic to something I used to clean the house earlier that day.

Later, I was talking to Sophie on the phone, telling her about my rash and our theories as to its origin and she said, “Well, it couldn’t be Mrs. Meyers cleaning spray because it’s all-natural and organic.”

I told P what Sophie said and he replied, “Well, so is the Gulf of Mexico so that doesn’t mean much.”

He makes an excellent point.

If there is any place in the world where a person is likely to contract a rash, it would stand to reason it might be a place where it’s a common practice to carry your Marlboro Lights in your cleavage.

Eleven years ago today, at a little after noon on the hottest Saturday of the summer, this is where I was.

I’m the one in white at the front of the church.

A lot of things have changed in the last eleven years, but the thing that remains the same is that there is no one else I would rather spend my life with than him.

It’s been fun. It’s been hard. Most of all, it’s been an adventure.

We’ve laughed a lot and cried a little. We’ve learned what it really means to love someone for better or for worse.

It’s been more than I could have hoped for or imagined and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

I love you, P.

You’re still the one.

I have long believed that there are certain aspects of being a woman that are inherently not fair.

Like the fact that men don’t get cellulite on their thighs, yet wear swimsuit bottoms that come to their knees. Meanwhile, women fight cellulite from the moment puberty comes to call and are expected to wear the equivalent of their underwear every time they venture out to the neighborhood pool.

But, honestly, the thing that bothers me the most is how quickly most men can lose weight.

The following is a true story and I’m not changing any names to protect the innocent because I am bitter.

Last Saturday night, P and I went to a party for some friends of ours who recently got married. After we got home, P said he still felt hungry, so he made himself a milkshake.

At 11:30 at night.

If I did that my metabolism would pack its bags and leave me in the middle of the night, vowing never to return no matter how much I pleaded and begged that I would change.

Right before we got into bed, P decided to weigh himself. Who does that?

I don’t pretend to understand him, I just love him.

Anyway, I heard an expletive coming from the bathroom followed by his announcement that he had put on 10 pounds.

I’d like to say that his pain brought me no joy, but that would be a lie. Especially because I had just spent the last twenty minutes listening to him slurp up a chocolate milkshake while I drank water.

I went to sleep with the sound of his new diet resolutions ringing in my ears.

The next day, P was filled with zeal that can only be found in a fresh convert to diet religion. He had seen the error of his ways and was ready to repent. He was laying his trans-fats on the altar.

He read nutrition labels, he vowed to make Frito-Lay his arch nemesis, and he spent most of the day feeling hungry as his body adjusted to a caloric intake that was significantly less than that to which it had grown accustomed.

And because I am a supportive wife, I spent most of the day telling him why he had put on weight. It’s the nightly milkshakes, it’s the powdered Donettes, it’s the extra 700 calories a day that you consume purely in York Peppermint Patties.

I just wanted to be helpful.

Then, in a show of allegiance to his newly turned leaf, I made grilled chicken salads filled with fresh vegetables for dinner.

After dinner, he said he wanted to go weigh himself and see if his day of living right had made any difference.

I watched him walk into the bathroom and thought to myself, “Oh, bless his heart. He has no idea how long it will take to see a significant difference.”

He returned to the kitchen triumphantly and announced he had already lost six pounds.

SIX POUNDS.

Oh sure, you can say it was water weight or whatever, but you and I both know that the only woman in history who has ever lost six pounds in one day was Marie Antoinette.

And I don’t think any of us want to go that route.

Because what’s the point in being six pounds thinner if no one can tell that it’s you?

Remember how on Fridays I used to talk about fashion or something?

I’m not sure what happened.

And I realize I keep creating false hopes for all three of you who care about Fashion Friday because every Friday I promise that I’ll resume Fashion Friday the following week.

Honestly, I still intend to do Fashion Fridays because I enjoy them, but it will be sporadic over the summer. Because really, what do you need to know about summer fashion?

Wear shorts. Wear t-shirts. Wear skirts. Wear a swimsuit.

It’s all good.

As long as you have access to some A/C.

I’m leaving for Atlanta at 6:30 a.m. to attend Deeper Still. For those of you doing the math, that means I’m going to have to set my alarm for 4:30.

Oh the horror.

I haven’t set an alarm for 4:30 since Caroline was a newborn and her pediatrician said I needed to make sure she ate every three hours around the clock. That’s what I get for having a baby that only weighed 5 1/2 pounds.

The good news is that I managed to pack one carry on bag. However, since I’m only going to be gone thirty-six hours, it would have just been embarrassing to have to check a suitcase. Still, I haven’t traveled with just a carry on since my days of riding the Greyhound bus to Houston to visit my daddy with my rainbow duffel bag thrown over my shoulder.

So yesterday I spent the day meticulously obsessing over the inventory of my carry on. What if I spill something? What if I hate the shoes I pack? What if it doesn’t feel like a day for jeans and all I have are jeans?

You know, real problems.

Anyway, in spite of all my suitcase concerns, I spent most of the afternoon at the pool with Caroline. Everything was great until we stopped for a break at around 4:00 and I pulled out my cell phone to check in with P, only to discover that my cell phone wasn’t working.

Panic. Sheer panic.

How did my early 90’s self survive without a cell phone? Or as I called it back then, a CELLULAR phone.

I cannot even imagine all the time I wasted in my late teens sitting at home waiting for some loser to call. Time that could have been spent bettering myself or shopping.

Clearly, I couldn’t leave town (to a whole other state, no less) without a working cell phone.

The phone was working, it just said that I needed to insert the SIM card. I’m no technological wizard but I do know that the SIM card is the key to your cell phone universe.

So I took out the battery and took out the SIM card to research the problem. I used a highly scientific process to try to fix whatever was wrong with the SIM card, which means that I kind of rubbed it on my beach towel and then blew on it really hard.

After I put it back in the phone, it still wasn’t working. I can’t imagine why.

Caroline and I stayed at the pool a little while longer and then we left so that I’d have time to go to the AT&T store to say HALP! MAH PHONE IS BROKEN.

Since I couldn’t call P, I decided to stop by the house to let him know what was going on and share my STRESS. STRESS OVER MY NON-WORKING CELL PHONE. Nevermind that I spent the first twenty-four years of my life without one, I cannot function without it.

He opened it up while I stood next to him explaining that I’d already done that. “I’VE DONE THAT. I EVEN BLEW ON IT AND WIPED IT WITH MY BEACH TOWEL. CLEARLY, IT’S BEYOND HELP.”

That’s when he noticed that some idiot had put the SIM card back in facing the wrong direction. And it was kind of stuck. Which required tweezers.

And maybe some pliers.

But it finally came out.

P put it back in and turned on my phone. It worked.

He looked at me and said, “That’s a little thing I like to call doing it the RIGHT WAY.”

Whatever.

He’ll be lucky if I call him this weekend.

I’ll be posting updates on Deeper Still over at the LifeWay All Access blog this weekend.

While I was gone last weekend (Have I mentioned I was gone? Will I ever quit talking about it?) Caroline and P spent some quality time together.

My first clue that they’d watched some television shows of the hunting and fishing genre came when I called to let them know that I had arrived at the airport. Caroline answered and said, “Mama? Is your plane here?”

“Yes. Are y’all coming to pick me up?”

“We’re on our way. Mama! YOU WON’T BELIEVE IT. I SAW SOME PEOPLE ON T.V. CATCHING FISH WITH A BOW AND ARROW!”

Call it intuition, but I was pretty sure that Dora and Boots hadn’t spent any time spear-fishing while crossing through the lollipop mountain and the chocolate forest.

Although how awesome would it be if one day Dora told Boots that in some countries he’d be considered dinner so maybe he should just look at the map and keep his mouth shut?

No? Just me?

Forget I said anything.

But of all the things she saw this weekend on the various outdoor programming, she found one thing that has left her completely enraptured.

The ShamWow.

Apparently the ShamWow appeals to folks who enjoy the hunting and fishing programs.

Later on that night, the ShamWow commercial came on. Caroline heard it, stopped what she was doing and ran into the living room.

“OH MAMA. YOU HAVE GOT TO SEE THIS!”

“What is it?”

“SHHHHH. Just watch. You’ll never have to buy paper towels again. It’s only $20.00. It lasts FOR YEARS. IT CLEANS UP SPILLS FAST!”

For the next three minutes she repeated every line of the ShamWow commercial back to me while P just smiled.

I have a feeling that someone in my house may have ordered the ShamWow while I was gone.

And y’all know he didn’t just order one.

Because the ShamWow can be used to dry your car.

Wow. I don’t just have a few ideas for books for my vacation, but for the rest of my life. I think Karen Kingsbury was the clear winner. Her publisher couldn’t have come up with a better way to get some free P.R.

Anyway, I headed to the library this afternoon and chose three books for my trip. I’m not going to tell y’all what they are, but I will let you know my thoughts as I finish them. I’m really not trying to be all secretive but I’m afraid that I’ll share my choices and then get about twenty comments telling me it’s a horrible book and how I will hate it with every fiber of my being which will cause me to become horribly jaded before I ever even begin the first chapter.

I can’t handle that kind of pressure.

Just know that two of my choices were recommended in the comments and the other I chose on my own. Also, none of them are by Karen Kingsbury because I am a rebel at heart.

Seriously, thanks for all the suggestions. I’ve already read several of the suggested books which served as some sort of validation that I’m not completely out of the literary loop, in spite of the fact that In Style magazine is what is most often on my bedside table.

Of course I’m not entirely sure that the Shopaholic series counts as literary greatness, but the first two books in the series did make me laugh out loud at a time when I was completely sleep-deprived and hanging on to my sanity by a thread because Caroline was about three months old. However, after the third book in the series, I reached a point where I had a hard time believing anyone could continue to be that fiscally irresponsible.

And that is a strong statement coming from someone who regularly overdrew on her bank account from 1990-1994.

So, now that the book decision is settled, I’m trying to get everything else ready. I spent the rest of yesterday doing laundry and buying travel-sized toiletries at HEB. I am a sucker for travel-sized toiletries. I bought things I don’t even use at home just because they were available in little bitty bottles.

Then last night as I was cooking dinner, P and I began discussing a few details of our trip. I told him I had borrowed two big suitcases from Mimi and Bops so we’d have plenty of packing room. He informed me that he wasn’t going to take one of the big suitcases because why would he need all that room?

Here are the respective bags we will be taking on our trip.

No, that’s not a carry-on. That’s what P is taking as a suitcase.

Apparently I am married to the David Copperfield of packing.

This was the ensuing conversation.

“You can’t just take a backpack. You have to pack your suit.”

“Well, I’ll just put my suit in your suitcase.”

“Um, NO. THERE WON’T BE ANY ROOM.”

“How much are you packing? We’re going to be at the beach. What will you possibly need other than a bathing suit?”

“How long have you been married to me?”

“Seriously, how will you fill all that space?”

“Minimum five pairs of shoes, hair products, multiple outfits, and vast amounts of beauty products. I require maintenance. In the words of Dolly Parton, ‘It takes some effort to look like this’.”

Eye roll.

Not him. Me.

All I know is I’m not taking up precious room in my suitcase for his suit. He’s going to have a heck of a time getting out all the wrinkles after it’s been stuffed in a backpack for the better part of six hours.

Although I may still bring the other suitcase because I could totally fit my three favorite pillows and a sound machine in it, which would officially make it THE BEST VACATION EVER.

And if there’s room for his suit among my pillows, I’ll consider letting it in.

I came home yesterday after I dropped Caroline off at school and spent the next few hours procrastinating. I knew what I had to do, but I wanted to live in denial just a little while longer.

So the first thing I did was let the dogs drag me around the neighborhood for about two miles while I tried to maintain some sort of dignity by pretending that I always run at a dead sprint down the street with my arms flailing wildly and screaming at my dogs to STOP! SLOW DOWN! I AM GOING TO SELL YOU TO THE NEXT PERSON WE PASS!

When the exercise portion of my morning was over, I decided to iron some clothes.

That’s right. I said iron.

I am the same person who got out the ironing board about three months ago causing Caroline to come up to me and ask, “Oh Mama! What is that?”

Oh honey, that’s just the devil in the form of a collapsible board covered in an ugly floral print.

I needed to iron because I purchased a few new shirts for P this week. He’s decided he’s a big fan of the short-sleeve button down shirt because he gets too hot in knit polo-type shirts. And if I had to sit next to him in a Mexican restaurant one more time and listen to him talk about how his knit shirt was SO HOT that he was going to have to take another shower by the time we got home, then one of us wouldn’t have survived.

So I bought him a few shirts to ensure that he wouldn’t spontaneously combust from the heat caused by his Gap knit polos.

I think he looks really good in the color blue so I looked for a blue shirt and found a great one on sale at Macy’s. As soon as I pulled it out of the bag to show him he said, “That looks just like my other blue short-sleeved shirt.”

“No it doesn’t. It’s TOTALLY DIFFERENT. They couldn’t be MORE DIFFERENT.”

“Okay. Whatever.”

Later that night, Caroline and I were watching T.V. and he came in to try on the shirts to make sure they fit. When he pulled the blue one out of the bag, Caroline said, “DADDY! THAT LOOKS JUST LIKE YOUR OTHER SHIRT!”

I think it was a set up.

Here are the shirts.

Clearly they could not be more different.

He felt the need to wash the new shirts immediately because that is what he does. He washes brand new, perfectly pressed clothes.

I do not understand this. Why would you wash an article of clothing that is brand new?

Truth be told if I had caught him in time I never would have let him put those shirts in the washer. I would have done what I’ve always done which is hang them up in his closet and pretend like I had taken them to the cleaners. He never would have known the difference.

But since I was too late and they were already clean, I felt the need to go ahead and just iron them. Because that is the kind of wife I am.

Plus, I knew I needed to iron a few of Caroline’s dresses because the last time I made her iron them she didn’t really get the wrinkles out. It’s like her heart wasn’t in it.

But at the core of my ironing frenzy, however, was my need to put off the inevitable.

I had to take an online defensive driving course.

Oh the horror.

I’ve put it off for months but it could wait no longer. Unless I wanted a warrant issued for my arrest.

So I spent four hours of my life, four hours I will never get back, trying to finish a defensive driving course before it was time to pick up Caroline from school.

The last time I took defensive driving I remember watching a piece of classic cinema entitled “Blood Runs Red on the Highway”. It was the feel good movie of the year. Yesterday I learned that it has been traded in for an even more upbeat version (if that’s possible) called “DEAD IN FIVE SECONDS”.

The Department of Transportation really has no sense of humor. Nor do they seem to realize that a film called “DEAD IN FIVE SECONDS” shouldn’t last for twenty minutes and fifty-eight seconds. It’s just bad marketing.

I’m sad to report that as of this moment I still haven’t finished my course. I have to complete two more exciting units on ROAD SIGNS and WHAT TO DO IF A HUGE ELK JUMPS IN FRONT OF YOUR VEHICLE.

I just can’t bear to finish right now.

So I’m off to iron another one of P’s new shirts. It’s a nice yellow linen shirt that I bought to go with a pair of his plaid shorts. Although he just informed me that he “muffin-topped those shorts” about three years ago.

This is why I love him.

In spite of the fact that he thinks knit polo shirts are too hot.

Many years ago, when P and I were newly married and childless, a very nice family who had kids in our Campus Life ministry used to let us stay in their beach-front condo for one week every August. It was the perfect vacation for a couple of poor twenty-somethings and we looked forward to it every year.

We’d usually drive down there and stay for a few days by ourselves and then invite a few friends to come join us for the remainder of the week.

One summer P decided it would be fun to invite his friends Todd and Jay to join us and we could all go deep-sea fishing. I thought it was a great idea.

Because I am an idiot.

An idiot with very little short-term memory.

I get seasick. I know this. It’s been well-documented.

In fact, two weeks after P and I got married we were invited to go fishing with some dear family friends. Everything was fine until we started fishing in the surf. And then SICKNESS! NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE! Please someone throw me over the boat so that a shark will eat me piece by piece and this horrific seasickness will finally be over.

Not to mention the mortification of throwing up repeatedly in front of my very new husband and our friends.

While wearing a bathing suit.

Precious memories.

And sure some of it may be psychological, but to this day I don’t really do that well in the backseat of a car. Heaven help me if it gets hot. Even if I’m riding in the front seat I can’t turn around and look at Caroline in her booster without starting to feel that queasy feeling.

The point is I have motion sickness issues.

So, in hindsight, deep-sea fishing, not really the best idea.

But I was reeled in (get it?) by the thought of all the cool fish we might catch. Maybe I’d catch a huge swordfish even though I’m pretty sure they don’t live in the Gulf of Mexico. But they could have swam (swum? tomato? to-mah-to?) there for vacation and what if I was the first person to catch one?

Plus, I really wanted to go because I knew P really wanted me to go. It was going to be a great trip. Seasickness has no hold on me. It’s all about the power of POSITIVE thinking. OPTIMISTS UNITE.

However, as a precaution, I stocked up on Dramamine, Dramamine patches, and ginger pills which are supposed to help with the motion sickness.

Because I am like a Girl Scout. Always prepared.

The details of that morning are hazy, which is probably due to the fact that I’d already popped two Dramamine and was wearing a Dramamine patch on my arm. I just remember that we left well before daybreak, which should have been my first clue that I was not necessarily cut out for deep-sea fishing expeditions.

We arrived at the boat and were met by Captain Awesome and his first lieutenant, Tattoo. Honestly, I don’t remember their real names so I just made those up. It’s called CREATIVE LICENSE because I was too whacked on Dramamine to remember anything.

The boat started heading out towards the deep sea. And here’s a critical fact that I was not aware of, it takes a long time to get out to the deep sea. A really long time. Fear started to overtake me as I realized that I couldn’t just decide mid-day that I’d had enough of the fishing. I was clearly going to be stuck out at sea.

So I popped another Dramamine to quell my rising fear.

Finally we stopped at our destination which was, for lack of a better term, in the middle of the dadgum ocean. I couldn’t see the shore. I COULDN’T SEE THE SHORE.

Even now I can still feel the panic.

And the boat started rocking. Not rocking in a good way, like “rocking” from all the fun we were having. Oh no. It was rocking because of the waves. Oh sweet mercy the waves.

The sea was angry that day, my friends.

But not as angry as my stomach, which immediately began a mutiny on every meal I had ever consumed in my life.

Captain Awesome and Tattoo tried to distract me by baiting my hook and handing me a fishing pole. I think the logic was that if I could start catching fish I would forget about writing my will and screaming “JUST KILL ME NOW”.

All of a sudden my fishing pole almost bent in half and the line started dragging like crazy. Everyone was yelling at me to reel, reel, REEL! So I did and I forgot I was in total agony because I was about to bring in the largest fish ever caught in Texas deep-sea fishing history.

And I did catch something very large. Our boat.

That’s right, my friends. My line had gotten wrapped around our boat motor.

And that pretty much sums up how the rest of our day went.

P, Todd and Jay fished with Captain Awesome and Tattoo while I laid on the back of the boat, popping Dramamine repeatedly, hoping that seagulls would come carry me off and drop me in the mouth of a whale to put the final nail in this hell I was living out.

We didn’t catch one fish that day. Not one.

Captain Awesome was not awesome. He was the devil. The devil that knew nothing about fishing. The devil that had bought a boat on a whim and a book called “So You Want to Be A Deep-Sea Fishing Guide” and then forgotten to read the book.

In fact his last words to us, as he took his money for the day, were “I’m going to go get drunk”.

But no matter how much he drank, I bet he wasn’t as hung over as I was three days later when I finally woke up from my Dramamine-induced coma. P said at one point he thought about holding a mirror under my nose to make sure I was still breathing.

P and his friends were furious about the way the trip had turned out. Not because I had almost died at sea mind you, but because we hadn’t caught any fish.

Which warms my heart to this day.

They felt that Captain Awesome had misled them about the way he fished and the places we would go to find fish, and since P had read about Captain Awesome in Texas Fish and Game magazine (not to be confused with Cheaper Than Dirt!) he wrote a letter to the editor voicing his displeasure.

He had me proofread the letter before he sent it, because I may not be able to deep-sea fish, but boy can I proofread. And that’s what every man really wants, a good editor.

The letter talked about our disappointment in the day and how Captain Awesome hadn’t lived up to the hype of the article about him in Texas Fish and Game. It was passionate and heartfelt. Our struggle with the angry sea and a belligerent captain. Like a modern day “Moby Dick”.

But my favorite line of the whole letter, in fact maybe my favorite line ever, was the part where P wrote, “The real tragedy is that because of this experience my wife will never go deep-sea fishing again.”

I told him to add an exclamation point to that sentence. And put “never” in all caps.

Even though I disagreed with him.

The real tragedy is that I spent four days of my life passed out from Dramamine. Days that could have been spent lying by the pool. Looking at water that doesn’t move.

P and I are sitting here spending our Saturday night watching one of the true cinematic classics, “The Electric Horseman”. He’s never seen it which frankly is a travesty and makes me wonder how we ended up together.

And I hate to say this but I think he may be mocking one of my favorite movies of all time.

Granted, it is slightly unbelievable that a man on a horse could outrun a band of police cars and several police motorcycles.

Without losing his cowboy hat.

But back in 1979 when I was a ten year old girl wearing some sweet cowboy boots from Weiners, something in this movie spoke to me deeply. I just knew I wanted to spend my life out on the range with wild horses.

Unless I decided to spend it trying to win cross-country races disguised as a nun in an ambulance with Dom Deluise as Captain Chaos and Burt Reynolds as J.J. McClure.

And if you were born after 1980 you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Tragic.

But, most importantly, watching “The Electric Horseman” and seeing Robert Redford’s lightly feathered hair has triggered a memory that P has never shared with me. In 5th and 6th grade he used to blow dry his hair using a brush attachment to achieve that winged-back look.

This piece of information has made my Saturday night complete.

P and I have been married for ten years now. And really, it doesn’t seem like it’s been a day over nine and a half years, unless you count the nights that I am forced to watch “The Spirit of The Wild With Ted Nugent” or “American Shooter”. Then it seems as if we’ve been together forever. As if we’re stuck in a vortex of time that will never end.

Over the last ten years, I’ve learned most of P’s quirks. For instance, he likes to just use half a paper towel and leave the other half lying on the kitchen counter to use at a later time. Which doesn’t bother me at all. That half piece of torn paper towel just lying there next to the sink. Not one bit.

I’ve known for some time that he has a fear of running out of things which causes him to buy in bulk. He might argue with this, but he actually asked me last weekend if I was going to the store because we were “out of everything”. I told him to make a list because I wasn’t sure what we needed. His definition of “everything” and mine are very different.

Later that afternoon, I looked at his list.

York Peppermint Patties.

Q-tips.

Clearly, we were living like savages.

What if Armageddon began and we were trapped like rats without any means with which to clean our ears or enjoy a chocolate mint treat?

Maybe it’s because I have been so complacent as to let us run out of mints and Q-tips, that P has become a fan of the bulk purchase. When I’m making a grocery list he’ll always write “Deodorant” or “Shaving Cream” and then tell me to go ahead and buy five cans of each.

Because who wouldn’t want to spend $250.00 at the store with $150.00 of that being excessive toiletry items?

I will admit that I have been known to let us run out of important things such as toilet paper. I’m not proud, but in the interest of full disclosure I’ll throw that out there. So, I may have inadvertently contributed to P’s problem. Not that there’s any greater problem than being caught without toilet paper.

Unless it’s being caught without Peppermint Patties.

Anyway, on Saturday I decided it would be a fun activity for Caroline and me to wash my car in the driveway, which I blame on the fact that our smoke alarm had gone off four different times in the middle of the night causing me to wake up with some type of deluded optimism.

I had attempted to drive my car through several car washes last week, but due to the excessive pollen and some kind of mud rain that drifted in from Mexico a few weeks ago, the automated car wash wasn’t getting it clean as much as just smearing all the various environmental toxins around creating a substance akin to egg yolks dipped in glue.

P had some appointments to go on, but before he left he got out a bucket, some soap and a few sponges for us. He told me that I could find anything else I needed in the garage.

Caroline and I got to work washing the car which, surprisingly, wasn’t nearly as fun as I remembered it being when I was sixteen. It was hot and messy, and cleaning out my wheel wells made my back hurt because I am not in the shape I was back when I could do forty high-kicks in a row.

Plus, due to my OCD tendencies, I couldn’t just halfway do it. The car had to be spotless. I even pulled out Caroline’s booster seat and something growled at me.

I needed some Armor-all to clean the interior so I went into the garage. I really try to never go in the garage because it is old and I feel certain that it may be home to some sort of creature that would fall under the phylum rodentia. But I had to have the Armor-all, so I ventured in and couldn’t believe what I saw.

I mean, I’m not one to air my family’s dirty laundry on the internet.

But, look. Look at this.

Clearly, P has been running some sort of sideline business as a car wash operator behind my back.

Why else would one family, a family who has washed their vehicles at home maybe twice in the last ten years, need this kind of automotive cleaning arsenal?

And I can’t even talk about these orange cones.

It’s like I don’t even know who he is.