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Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Domesticness and Discoveries

Yea, I know that most likely is not a real word but it works for me.

The other day I had a moment where I felt like there had to be a camera somewhere recording me for use on "America's Funniest Home Videos". First, I was sliding a pizza into the over and the piece of cardboard underneath it collapsed just a slid it forward. The pizza fell to the oven door and since I had preheated the oven, it was too hot to just pick it up. With a tricky combination of forks and tongs and swearing, I got the pizza back onto the oven rack but NOT before several wheels of pepperoni went spiraling into the bottom of the oven and onto the heating coils. I managed to get all of them but one and it immediately caught on fire and sent smoke tumbling through the kitchen. Just as I stood there thinking what to do, my son came down the stairs quickly yelling that the toilet upstairs had overflowed and there was water anywhere. (Too bad I couldn't think of a way to use the water to put out the fire . . . ). Fortunately, Joseph walked back through the front door at that moment and he tackled the water issue while I handled the burning pepperoni. We met up a few minutes and bemoaned the craziness of domesticness. :)

Then tonight, I had a little discovery that made me pause and wonder. Just last week, I discovered that a character on many episodes of "How I Met Your Mother" was also a teenage actress from the old comedy "Roseanne". I was shocked to make that connection. Then, tonight, I was watching a holiday movie with Dixie Carter. I knew she had died recently, so I looked her up and it said that she had starred on the soap opera "The Edge of Night" way back in the mid-1970s. That was my favorite soap opera to watch with my mom. I wondered who she had played, so I looked it up on You Tube and she had played my favorite character--the one named Nicole that I liked so much I decided that if I ever had a daughter, I would name her Nicole. (And look, I did just that!) I had never, ever made that connection before and it was a neat moment.

So life is full of domestic emergences and unexpected discoveries. It is also full of a slowly increasing number of assignments, which I am grateful for. It will still be a very, very lean Christmas but at least I'm not looking at classified ads for part time jobs any more. That's a relief. I worked in retail a few years ago and decided that was NOT the direction for me. I have an all new appreciation for clerks now.

Okay . . . I've put in a 10 hour day today (and I'm still not caught up, darn it!) and it's time for bed. I got my holiday letter done finally--hours of writing and choosing photos, more hours of printing (and running out of ink twice) and then an hour of signing, collating, folding and putting into envelopes, but it will go out in tomorrow's mail. I'm really pleased with how it turned out, all 15 pages and 26 photos of it.

Okay, I really have to go. I am one tired woman. G'nite friends.

3 comments:

Ami said...

I didn't know Dixie Carter was dead.
Not that it would have made a huge blip on my radar.. but yeah.

Hell, I'm still missing George Carlin.

As for the pizza/toilet incident... I can't top that. (ha.. get it?? TOP that???)

Not that I'd want to.

Ami said...

PS... whaddya mean it's not a real word?

I've seen it in print... doesn't that make it real?

Markell said...

I'm not sure how it differs semantically from "domesticity," but certainly any adjective can take -ness, and there you have a new English word!

Free samples from my manuscript, "Phrase Anatomy":

It went downhill when he left, but never quite to its original crumminess. -Steve Richardson about the Greely Diner

I have a great relationship with my assistants; they understand my fast-pacedness; they understand my craziness. Real Housewives of New York City

So go ahead, Tami! Use any words you like.