PARTY OF ONE

 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-03-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     My wife left for a little vacation last weekend to get away from things, she didn't say exactly what things, but it was probably the cat, sitting on her newspaper incessantly and knocking the pens off the table just for sport, or maybe the dog. How much unconditional love can you take?

     That means I had the whole house to myself, and I had an entire slate of activities planned. I got right down to the first item on my list, which was a nap. When I got up I fed the dog dinner which was actually this morning's breakfast that she didn't eat. I made a nice little charade of breaking an egg into the bowl and cooking a western omelet, but she didn't fall for it because I didn't have any pretend peppers. I wouldn't have eaten it either- imagine having the same thing day after day. I offered to go for take-out, but Gidget almost never has any money. There are a lot of things I'm supposed to do this weekend, and the beauty of it is I can do them whenever I want. I chose to do the laundry AFTER my wife comes home, and when she sees what I have planned for it she'll snatch it out of my hands like a live hand grenade.

     Sorry if I woke you up, that was me mowing the lawn at 12:30 in the morning. That's one of the great things about being on your own schedule. I can mow the lawn whenever I please. It was a little dark and scary out there, and I saw something lunge at me trying to attack, but it turned out to be a toad. It was a large one, though. I have one of those miner's lights that attaches to your head so you can see what you're doing if you find yourself in an either ore situation, and I almost ran over a rock when I was escaping from the toad. I don't know how miners get anything done- I went back inside because I thought I smelled a canary- is that good or bad?

     I'm trying to install this air conditioner that I had sent over from Home Depot, and they should have just delivered it right onto my foot, because I dropped it there anyway. The instructions that were written in Chinese were no harder to understand than the ones in English, which bore little-to-no resemblance to reality. I tried to find a video on YouTube that would help me make sense of the instructions or at least help me learn Chinese. Usually somebody from YouTube has the same problems I do, if not all at the same time. If I had children and I had to give them the talk about the "facts of life" I would probably just tell them to find a video that explains everything on YouTube. I don't remember all the scientific names of everything that I learned in Health Class, even though I remember what everything does, if everything is supposed to do. I remember something about a "vas deferens," but I haven't heard a thing about it since. One of the facts of life is that instructions that come with the thing that you just bought suck, so I've been drilling holes in the side of my house all weekend, and I intend to bolt this air conditioner bracket into one of them.

     I got up bright and early at 11 o'clock the next day for breakfast, and had a hankering for homemade pancakes. The recipe called for double-acting baking soda, but the kind I had in the cabinet was just single-acting, if it was acting at all. It pretty much just sat there, so I put twice as much in. A cup of milk, all I could find was a coffee cup. A couple eggs, some baking powder, a little salt, and bingo! Maybe I should have made the homemade pancakes at somebody else's home, they were not too good. I probably should have cleaned the coffee cup first.

     I smelled like the Dickens all weekend and I didn't even care, no offense to Dickens. That's another great thing about the single life, and also the reason one might still be single. Personal hygiene goes right to hell if you don't have anyone around to wrinkle their nose at you. I started to get a little stir crazy after a while and I was talking to myself about things I wasn't all that interested in. If there were four or five other guys here it would have been like a bad movie in the 1950s where I invite a bunch of dudes over for a bachelor's night, play some poker and smoke cigars, only nobody thought to bring cards. I order some stag films but I order the wrong thing and it's a movie about male deer, etc. So we're just sitting around watching the deer movie which is more interesting than anyone wants to admit, arguing about which are the best potato chips, and thank god no one asks if I have any Streisand records.

     A long weekend is about all I can take of me. Maybe I should get away from things for a while, but my wife won't tell me where she is.