In Search of the Giant Pink Sea Snail. And a Clean Kitchen Floor

I think I actually made the grrrr sound this morning as I crawled around scrubbing the kitchen floor. Yes, we own a mop, but the mop is neither as useful in actually cleaning the floor nor does it give off the same Cinderella-esque air of poor pitiful me for which I seemed to be aiming.

Of course, being like that on my hands and knees also made me a most tempting target. I commend MathMan for not delivering the kick I so richly deserved.

I was in a mood. And I really couldn't explain it except that maybe it was a combination of mini-hangover, chronic Hell I'm Fat! back pain, and a spike in my blood sugar courtesy of a bowl and a half of stale Yucky Charms.

Decent, healthful food is in short supply at the moment.

Perhaps I should blame the media. I mean, heck, we could blame the media for damn near everything these days. Did you see that silliness surrounding that golf player yesterday? I didn't, but I watched some humorless twit from ABC giving her opinion of what it all meant to the guy on PBS. Wow, PBS, is that the best you could do? I was just sitting there eating my gourmet dinner of a hotdog with mustard waiting for Rick Steve's Europe to come on and I had to suffer through a second hand account of the golf player's apology via a woman who was quite pleased that she wasn't invited in the first place because the inability to ask questions was such an affront to her standards as a journalist? Wasn't it bad enough that I had to eat a hot dog because of the slim picken's around here? Renew my membership, indeed.

Lord, where was I? Too many nitrates or is it sulfates these days? ... Oh yes, I was doing a Sarah Palin. Blaming the media. Oh, I don't mean the media as in the paparazzi that I'm always having to ask Sean Penn to come and put in its place. I'm referring to the media that I quite willingly invite into our bedroom on lazy weekend mornings.

I woke up entirely too early this morning. Since it isn't Bed In Day yet I didn't suggest that we go back to the mystery DVD we fell asleep to last night. No. We save those for Sunday. Instead I turned on the Turner Movie Classics, my go-to channel these days.

We watched the movie version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Well, we got as far as (SPOILER ALERT!) Caesar being stabbed and Marlon Brando, I mean Marc Antony, carrying him out for the Romans to see and then.......zzzzzz.

That showoff MathMan noted that in the half of the movie we watched, he caught at least five quotes that people still use today. I told him to shut the hell up. He's the math guy and I'm the words person and I'd only caught the stars* quote and something about the eyes of March. I won't have him upsetting the balance of talents that make this household run like the well-oiled machine it is. He gets Pythagoras. I get Billy S.

Matching wits wasn't going to make for nice stuff this morning. We were already having issues with keeping the blankets in order. And I was struggling to stay awake long enough to hear the Render Unto Caesar line, which I'm only 67% 47% sure is a line from that play. Besides which I was terribly distracted in my own muddled ways. When I wasn't staring at James Mason's sexy sexy forearms with that delicious wrist cuff, I was dang near swooning over Greer Garson's and Deborah Kerr's fabulously long and lustrous locks.

And then I had to ask the question that was burning in my mind. "Did the Romans really run around in tablecloths and can we bring that style back?"

Well, we missed the end of the movie because we fell asleep again. A bit later, we woke up and
had a quick breakfast in bed with Rex Harrison and Anthony Newley starring in Doctor Dolittle. I remember thinking, even as a young'un that if Rex Harrison had just taken the damn dress and bonnet off the seal, you could have cut that movie by about ten minutes. Not to mention canning most of the music. Anyway, as we were watching and I was consuming a great deal of sugary cereal, I had a flashback to my childhood. I think we had the Little Golden book of Dr. Dolittle or maybe a child's record of Talk to the Animals. Whatever it was, grown up considerations and obligations crowded out the memory and the moment was gone.

Lately, that's happening more and more. I can't complete a sentence or a thought before something comes swooping in to crowd it out. MathMan would tell me that it's a numbers thing again. The longer you live, the more memories you accumulate and the harder it is to maintain your tenuous grasp on your thoughts. He's a helpful devil, isn't he?

Anyway, I started to tell you about how the media affected me. Honestly, I don't remember where that thought was going (nowhere), but I'm happy to tell you that the kitchen floor remained clean for approximately one hour seven minutes and forty-eight seconds. Sadly, that's just because I so frightened the children when they first attempted to cross the kitchen threshold that they stayed well clear of it until I was gone.

Effective though it may be, it's a mighty traumatic thing to behold a mother, wildhaired, bra straps showing under the ill-fitting black tank and the lavender pajama pants four sizes too big crawling around quoting Shakespeare to herself. It was probably overkill to bare my teeth and growl, but I wasn't taking any chances. I wanted that floor to remain clean at least until I could haul myself to a stand and survey it for a second or two.

Simple pleasures, people. It's all I ask.....

*"Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings". - (Quote Act I, Scene II).