A Day in the Life

I noticed that several people mentioned the infrequency of my posts, and it got me to thinking about the reason for my tardiness. Procrastination definitely plays a role, this I know. However, I have a very crazy life. As I sit here in my basement to type even these few words, upstairs Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra are singing “The Lady is a Tramp”, my husband is running the bathtub faucet and traipsing up and down the stairs next to me with huge buckets as he changes the water of our 90-gallon fish tank, and my stepson is in the next room playing a new rap song that he wrote and recorded. All this, and the dryer is running as well. Who can concentrate?

I knew deep in the recesses of my Word program, I had typed a description of one particular day this year because it just seemed incredibly hectic...so I decided to share it with you (…please bear in mind that this was not written for a post, only for my need to vent, so the grammar may not be perfect). For those of you who ever wondered…

A DAY IN THE LIFE

Wake up, start getting ready for work. My daughter says she’s ready, but takes another 3 minutes after I’ve gotten into car to actually come out, now wearing a different outfit than 5 minutes ago. We drive to the high school, she’s early for once. Go home to pick up other two kids, get my lunch, kiss husband good-bye and apologize for not being passionate the night before and falling asleep in 30 seconds flat. Inform him that I am not a man, and I need more preparation than climbing into bed to get my engine humming. Get kids off to middle school, give my son the daily lecture about not being ready on time and does he think he’ll be able to follow this rule since it’s already May and I’ve been repeating it daily since September? Ask him to please get out of the car and go around the back of it like my stepdaughter does so I can bolt to work, since he once again made me late. He argues that I will only save a few seconds than if he walks in front of my car, and although he’s probably right, I just need to feel that I’m at least that much closer to work by peeling out of the parking lot and having the kids breathe my burning rubber. Race to work, make it there with 3 minutes to spare. Get participants off of buses; copies of bus lists have everyone’s name cut off, so I try to make new ones while at least 20 out of 35 people vie for my attention about such things as runny noses, last night’s function, someone said something mean about someone else, someone’s going to a bowling dinner tonight, etc. Try very hard to validate everyone’s conversation without screaming and running for the hills. After about 20 minutes, I’m instructed to take 6 participants to another day hab site so they can spend some time there while we entertain some new kids at our site who are ready to graduate high school and move on to the “Next Step” (our program). I take them; one girl starts complaining, ready to cry, that it’s too squishy in the back seat of the van, her ankle hurts, why does she have to go to the other site, it’s not fair…within 5 minutes, someone says something that cracks her up, and she continues to laugh uncontrollably for the next 10 minutes. Drop off these 6 participants and return back to my site to pick up 4 other participants that will come to a job at a senior center in Pt. Washington. We have to leave early because of the impending HS group that’s coming, so I decide to kill time and go to WalMart to see Marie Osmond, who’s signing autographs for a new book or something. She’s supposed to be there at 11am, so I figure if we leave WalMart at 11:10, we’ll still make it to Pt. Washington Senior Center by 11:45. After listening to much griping from my guys about waiting around for someone they’ve never even heard of, we leave after realizing that it’s 11:10 and she will be late. We get into the van and head off to Port Washington. My daughter calls me on my cell phone and tells me that she doesn’t feel well, can I come and get her (no). I tell her to call back at 1:00, and I’ll see what I can do. All 4 participants fall asleep in the van; one boy is talking and snoring at the same time, if that’s possible. We finally get to Pt. Washington, and go in our usual entrance. We’re informed by some strange lady that we have to go “under the church” for the senior lunch people that we’re supposed to serve, due to the fact that the regular lunch room is decorated for someone’s anniversary party. We start wandering around all of the buildings, and end up down cement basement stairs that have no railing (she did say, “under the church”). I have two very unsteady participants, and I try to help them down the creepy steps. We get to the door at the bottom and there’s no handle, no one answering our knocks, and an extremely dark, gloomy room on the other side of the door glass. One of the senior citizens is wandering around as well; he can’t find his way either, so he tells us that he’ll go look while we try to make our way up from bottom of the stairs. He finds the location across the parking lot in the actual church (..and on the main floor, besides). We go in, and everyone has already begun eating lunch (we’re supposed to serve them). We sit down to eat our lunch; I shove my pb&j down my throat and get up to collect everyone’s garbage. One of the seniors chews food, puts it in a napkin and hands it to me. We then get up and leave, 20 minutes later. We get back to the site, and I’m rushed out to go to a “company picnic” meeting at the Plainview office that I stupidly volunteered to be a committee leader for in our site. My daughter texts me on the way there: “Can u come get me” (no). I apologize, tell her I love her and to hang in there. We discuss different things in the meeting. It ends at 2:00; the leader of meeting says, “Don’t worry, you can go home and still get paid for 2:30.” Yes, but I have my site’s van (my coordinator’s suggestion), and I only get paid until 2:15. So I race back to the site, and realize once there that I still have 5 of the participant’s books to write up. I’ll have to do them tomorrow, I figure, and I better leave to get my daughter, since it’s now 2:20. Get my daughter who is miraculously better, and now wants to drive the car. We go to nail salon to pick up her books that she left there last Friday. We go home, she immediately goes on computer, I go upstairs and eat ¼ box of cereal while picking through mail…tax return checks are in there, but not what I hoped they would be. I leave to go pick up my son. He gets into car and immediately starts asking if I can take him to the game store because he has early birthday money, it’s burning a hole in his wallet and he needs to spend it NOW (he didn’t actually say that, but he may as well have). I say no, not until his tutor leaves later on. He sighs and says that I would always do this for my daughter and starts with the guilt crap. I dismiss him, and he immediately forgets about it to tell me to look at a video on his phone, which I can’t do because I’m actually driving. So I pull over, look at a video of something that only he understands, and say, “Oh, that’s nice!” Suddenly, someone with a gas scooter goes flying past the open passenger window, scaring the pants off of both of us. My son laughs for 5 minutes, because he thought it was a lawnmower doing 50mph. We go home. I decide to start paying some bills and figure I’d better get the charities out of the way because I’ve been using their address labels for about 8 months and never sent them any money. I realize after a while that my dog, Freedom, has an appointment for a lump on his leg in 15 minutes, so I rush him out of the door while my other dog starts barking and running around like crazy because it’s not him going out. We get to the vet, and Freedom immediately pees like a racehorse onto the floor and the entry mat. They have to call someone in to clean it, while I stand there embarrassed because every person in the waiting room has obviously never seen a dog pee before, judging from the horrified looks on their faces. In the waiting room there is a cat in a basket (yes he’s real, and he just sits in a basket), guinea pigs, hamsters, an iguana and a very friendly, loose parrot that Freedom decided he wanted to taste—so they put us in a room by ourselves to wait for the vet. At this point, Free gets so nervous, he pees and starts to crouch for a poop, to which I screamed, “NO!!” and one little piece fell out. I scrounged around for paper towels, picked it up and wrapped it tightly. He paced and paced, all the while shedding hair like ticker-tape confetti, most of it landing on my clothes (why am I wearing black sweatpants?). I realize he probably has to go badly, so I take him outside where he makes such a mushy poop that I can’t even pick it up with the paper towel I brought out. Not to mention the 5 minute pee he took on a tree…I think he was a camel in another life, he holds a lot of water. We finally go back in and see the doctor, who loves Free but thinks he has a bad cancer from oldness…$200 later, we leave with antibiotics, powder, and the knowledge that he needs surgery for another $500. And if they find the bad cancer, he’ll need chemo. I go home to find my son with the tutor, who sympathizes with Freedom’s fate. My husband is there, getting angry at the cost of the vet and the unnecessary comment that we should put an old dog through chemo. My stepdaughter’s mother keeps calling and wondering where she is (we are too; we just figured that her gymnastics practice went on long because of a meet tomorrow). And my daughter surfaces to tell me she’s going out with my favorite person, KS (a boy she’s liked since she’s 12 who constantly leads her on). And, can she have money? I give her $3 and my son throws a fit that see, he’s right, I only give to his sister. The house is a mess, I’m trying to heat up leftovers, and all of a sudden I feel goo on my bare foot and realize that one of the dogs just threw up in the kitchen and I stepped in it. To which the tutor gets hysterical laughing. We eat, and I tell my son I can take him now. We go….

That’s how it ended, most likely because something ELSE came up that night to interrupt my writing! However, we did find my stepdaughter, my son did get his video game, my dog is still alive (so is the parrot), and we all lived happily ever after.