Life is a Comedy of Errors

Hannah is not as floppy as when she was a toddler, but she still has the uncanny knack of knocking over my coffee cup, no matter where I've placed it. Yesterday was on the dining room table, which, normally, would have been the perfect place for a spill, except we were putting together the Simpsons puzzle from Jooge and family. The tablecloth that we had placed over the puzzle overnight managed to soak up most of the coffee, and we whisked that off before more than one or two pieces got a little wet. It could have been worse, we said.

So I go in the kitchen for another tablecloth, since the table is my workspace and I need to recover the puzzle. I thought, hey, the plastic red-gingham picnic tablecloth would be perfect in case of more spills. Except it must have been damp the last time it was put away, because the felt backing was *molded*. blech! That meant dragging it into the bathroom to try to kill the mold with bleach.

Then John suggested that maybe the table wasn't the best place to work right now; what about the coffee table? O-kay... I make Hannah finish clearing her stuff off the coffee table and run the vacuum cleaner because our carpet was waaaay too hairy to even think about sitting on . Then I noticed more crumbs and blobs of hair on the tile in the dining room. Then the hallway. Then the kitchen.

And finally it occurred to me that we still had one more tablecloth, and viola, I didn't have to move my 20-pound pile of books and papers and dictionaries and music (to drown out the tv) into the living room. After all that faffing about, I was finally about to get to work. Which wasn't all that inviting of a prospect, let me tell you.

Then in the afternoon we all played hooky to go to the movies and then do our weekly grocery shopping. But now it's back to the mines!