Anyone's life can be a sitcom

My husband likes to point out every so often how my life resembles a sitcom.  Sadly, I don't think he means the sitcoms where all the characters, played by unbelievably sexy actors, wear equally sexy clothes and get to date equally sexy people (although I do think my husband is quite sexy - so maybe he's thinking of himself in this role.  Hmmmm... food for thought.)  Anyway, the sitcom my life more accurately represents is I Love Lucy, with a fair sprinkling of Home Improvement.  In case you're wondering, I'm both Lucy and Tim "The Toolman" Taylor in this scenario.  Not very flattering.  I could go into a long explanation and provide many examples to back up his theory, but it's his theory, not mine.  Besides, if my life is a sitcom, isn't his also - association by marriage and what not? 

Having said this, I can't argue that occasionally something happens to me that one might see on the TV.  Granted, it's not usually that funny to me, but when you think about it, are the characters on the TV often laughing when they do stupid sh$%@?  Not usually. 

To make my point, let me describe a recent camping trip.  Except for the tent blowing over onto me (there were 20+ winds almost the entire time), nothing really untoward happened there - if you ignore the fact that we forgot to bring the most critical of foods with us - syrup. Well, okay, I forgot to bring the syrup.  What's the big deal? one might ask.  The big deal is, I might snarl, that I'm making pancakes for twenty people (Four families, a million kids, chaos, don't ask) and I know every last one of them will expect syrup.  So we stopped at Lucky's, conveniently located about 30 minutes from our destination.  At this point I realized that I had also forgotten to bring anything to eat for me (I'm almost a vegetarian and no one else attending was) or ketchup.  My husband asked with exasperation if I had made a list.  "Yes," I replied calmly.  "I just never looked at it." 

You might think that I'm going into an awful lot of detail about something so "untoward" as I described above.  Well, it turns out that I had indeed packed syrup, so now we had 2 brand new bottles of syrup on our trip, not to mention the 2 bottles we have at home because one was left over from our last camping trip.  Good lord, one might ask, because one has a lot of nosy questions, how often do you use syrup?  About 2 times a year - one while camping.  But there is a silver lining.  One of those bottles of syrup tipped over on the trip home and emptied its entire contents over the carpeting in the back of my mini-van.  Have any of you ever tried to clean syrup out of carpet, particularly those little bits exposed around the plastic crap screwed into the backs of the seats?  And yes, for those of you who are paying attention, the floor of my mini-van  is also the backs of the seats that were conveniently folded down to make room for our piles of camping gear. 

We discovered the mess shortly after pulling into the driveway, where we had stopped only to drop my husband off.  He was in a hurry and we still needed to pick up our dogs at my mom's.  So instead of rushing off to the shower he so deserved (and needed - we were there for 3 days!) he helped me get the gear off of the syrup.  One of items happened to be an ice chest full of chilled water.  In his haste, my husband spilled said water all over the majority of the garage floor so that it puddled up against the wall leading into the house as well as the wooden cabinets, just waiting to create all sorts of lovely water damage.  So, instead of going after the syrup or helping my husband unload the car, I got to sweep water out of the garage. 

You heard me - sweep water out of the garage.  There were even a couple of incidents where I attempted to pick objects off the floor and place them on the nearest solid surface only to have them immediately fall into the puddle again.  It turned out that the solid surface was the table connected to my table saw (Yes, it's mine - not my husband's!) - and it's not solid.  So, let me recap.  Syrup, water, table with holes.  Damn, my husband was right.  Maybe my new nickname should be Lim, or Tucy.  (Get it?  A cross between Tim and Lucy)  But at least we're down to 3 bottles of syrup.

Workout Motivation

Usually by this point of Christmas Vacation I'm anxious to return to school because my children are driving me crazy, but this year we've found quality family time that everyone agrees on - the gym!  To be honest, I'm not one of those people who loves working out - I don't get filled with endorphins and feel overflowing with energy when I'm done, but my kids do, which is better than it sounds!  We belong to a newly renovated gym with the most impressive kids club I've ever seen.  It breaks the kids up by age group to protect the younger ones from the overly exuberant and large, but each side has an extensive play area complete with tunnels and slides and on top of that, the older area features a dance game on the Wii or some such gaming system.  Suffice it to say, I no longer have to feel guilty for dropping them off there, in fact, they've become my workout partners, so to speak.  "Mom, you haven't worked out today.  Don't you think you ought to go to the gym now?"  It's like having Jiminy Cricket and Richard Simmons all rolled into two cute little 7 and 4 year old packages that rarely leave my side, or at least my general vicinity.  Now that I think about it, my eldest does rather dress like Ricky and I bet she'd love one of his workouts.  I wonder if that's a coincidence...

By the way, does anyone know how to spell "Jiminy?"  :-)