Doing It Fine On Our Own, Thanks

I need to park myself on a couch and just read, because when I get up and actually do things, disaster ensues.

Last week, my household was assigned to work on the church cleaning crew.  I think the kitchen looked pretty good after I worked it over.  With a sigh of satisfaction, I carried a sloshing bucket of mop water to the janitor closet to rinse it out in the low sink there.

Why can't the water simply come out the spigot?  Why did they have to attach an elephant-trunk-sized hose to the thing?

Most especially, how did that hose slip out of my hands? 

Suffice it to say that, by the time by hands found the spigot handle (blind-lady style) and turned it the right way, the closet ceiling was raining and I was standing in enough water to do a batch of laundry.

On the bright side, maybe they won't ask me to clean again.

I went out for a sunny afternoon walk a few days later.  A few wood slats lay across a sidewalk and I gracefully stepped over them.  What I failed to see was the line strung across the sidewalk right behind the wood.  Before I knew it, I was scraping the sidewalk with my knees, my arms, my chin.

Oh, the bruises.  My star bruise is bigger than a burger bun.

Oh, the aches. I was shopping in Wal-Mart a day later, moaning softly as I clung to my walker  shopping cart.  Somewhere between grabbing a box of Brillo pads and hunting for the Life Cereal, I remembered:  I have big drugs at home.  I believe I'm entitled to them today. 

So God need not threaten me with any destroying angels.  He can just step out of the way and let me destroy myself.

That's why I should shut myself in a safe place and catch up on my reading.  My attention is divided these days.  Sometimes I reach for a real book; in this case, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables.    This is the last time I plan to afflict myself with Hawthorne.  If your reading education is as thin as mine, I'll just tell you it's about a once-prominent family now petered out.

And sometimes I reach for my Kindle, where I'm working through Robert Reilly's Making Gay OK, in which he reasons that normalizing homosexuality is quite possibly about excusing all sexual misbehaviors.   Everybody take a deep breath now and remember that there is a wide difference between throwing bricks through your gay neighbor's window (not OK) and calmly explaining why you think marriage licenses should say "Bride and Groom" instead of "Party A and Party B" (very OK).  Everybody take that deep breath because I've been feeling a lot of Down-with-Conservatives hate lately.  To quote Charles Krauthammer, a favorite columnist, "What’s at play is sheer ideological prejudice — and the enforcement of the new totalitarian norm that declares, unilaterally, certain issues to be closed."

Now, you'd think an accident-prone lady like me would be wise to stay out of the kitchen.  But I can't help myself.  And I did manage to cook Seasoned Potato Cubes without ruining the skillet, nicking off a finger, tripping over a cat or choking on the final product.   I'd pat myself on the back, but I'm too sore for that.