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Double Jointed

Posted by Domestic Diva at 1:30 pm Uncategorized

Feb 222011

I was running short on time as usual, so instead of asking a store associate for assistance, I tried to stretch my 5’4″ frame to reach the containers on the top shelf. Stepping on the bottom shelf, stretching my arm as far as it could go, I was just touching the front of the container with my fingertips. Stretching, reaching, stretching, the container spun round but not closer. Without really thinking it through, and just wanting the item, I jumped an inch or so off the bottom shelf, grabbed the bottle, and of course came crashing down on my ass in the middle of the aisle. Wearing wet snow boots, the skinny metal lip of the bottom shelf gave me not a moment of traction; so obviously I fell flat on my ass. Falling down would have been bad enough but when I grabbed the bottle I also knocked several other items from the shelf that wobbled and toppled, almost like dominoes, from nearly six feet above me, landing around me and even a few on my right leg and hand.

I sat, stunned by my own idiocy for a moment, surrounded by the kind of mess I’d expect from my three year old. I felt fortunate in that at least I was alone in the mess. I hopped to my feet, shook my hand which hurt from being hit with the falling bottles, and began to reach to clean up the mess when a small team (there were three) of store associates rounded the corner with great speed. As I began to apologize for the mess and explain nothing had broken (thank God for plastic), they began to assess my condition.

“Miss, are you okay? Did you hit your head? Are you injured? Does anything hurt?” the apparent leader of the pack questioned.

With my face presumably the deepest shade of red humanly possible, I replied, “I’m really very sorry; I thought I could reach the top shelf. Unfortunately, I’m about an inch too short and tried to get it down in a very poorly thought out plan that required some level of skill and athleticism both which I’m clearly lacking.”

The youngest of the group snickered at my lighthearted response, but was quickly silenced by a stern look from the leader. “Miss, I think you should sit down while I assess the situation.” In my mind, for a moment, what I heard was “Miss, I think you’re an ass. Sit Down.”

“Really, I’m fine,” I persisted. “Please let me clean this up and be on my way. Seriously, I’m sorry and I’m fine. I’m also in a hurry.”

“Are you sure you aren’t injured? We can call a ambulance,” he said in a very concerned voice.

“Please, please, please do not do that,” I said noticing shoppers walking slowly past the aisle and trying to determine the cause of the disturbance. “I am totally fine aside now from being extremely embarrassed. I’d love to pick up my mess here and go. Please.”

“We’ve got it, Miss.” the leader said still looking at me like I was going to lose consciousness at any moment. He pointed at the mess and the other two employees began to pick up the items. I bent over too, still feeling embarrassed , but just wanting to remove the evidence of my clumsiness and move on with my shopping trip life at this point.

With the last of the bottles being placed back on the shelf by the tallest of the three, I quickly remembered why this event happened in the first place. “Shoot!” I exclaimed. “Can you hand me one of those bottles right there?” I asked. “That’s what i was reaching for in the first place,” I explained pointing my crooked finger.

“Holy crap! Your hand!” the younger employee said. All eyes were on my red and crooked finger still extended and pointing at the bottle that was still so close, yet so far away.

“Oh, a bottle may have hit it, but I’m fine really. It doesn’t even hurt,” I said nonchalantly, tucking my hand behind my back.

“No, no! Your finger was all crooked! I think you broke it, seriously!” he exlaimed rather loudly.

“I knew it!” the leader spoke out. “Miss, let’s go to the office so I can…”

I abruptly cut him off. “Listen, listen! Calm down. My finger is not broken. I’m double jointed.”

Blank stares.

“Seriously, fellas. My hands are double jointed. I’m fine, so if you could just hand me the bottle….”

They still just stood there looking at me and I knew if I were ever going to get out of there, I was going to have to give a demonstration. So I did. And just like when I was in grade school the “boys” said “ewwww” and “ahhhhh” and thought it was “gross and kinda awesome” as the youngest employee so eloquently stated.

So I may not be very clever, I may have very poorly planned and executed plans, and my athleticism is obviously lacking, but at least I have side show fingers that never seem to fail.

This is my normal

This is what the store employee saw. I wanted something up and to the left, so I pointed to it.

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Anyone can be an azul

Posted by Domestic Diva at 9:04 pm Uncategorized

Feb 012011

Maybe it’s the constant onslaught of winter weather, but I’m feeling a wee bit bitchy lately. I feel like I’m going to look back at my posts in a few months and diagnosis myself with chronic PMS or something.

As I sit here now, listening to freezing drizzle hit the window, I’m not lulled or calmed by the melody of the sound, I’m annoyed. This, in part, is because we seem to get a winter storm the same time every week, and it keeps falling on my grocery shopping day.

I walked into the store yesterday, already irritated, at lunch time behind an elderly woman with a cane, a team of shopping friends (wth?), and a family. This I never understand either- why are both parents out with three kids? If you have two available parents, one of you should keep your infant, young baby and toddler at home…and the other does the grocery shopping (don’t forget the birth control!). Anyway, I was on a time crunch and had just 40 minutes before my husband’s lunch hour was up. Normally, this would be a tight time constraint for my weekly trip anyway, but with the store packed with snow-a-phobics, I knew I was in trouble.

As I weaved my way down one aisle after the next, I felt like I could be a champion on the old show, “Supermarket Sweep.” I checked off one item after another, maneuvering between shoppers, carts, stray children, stock boys and the like marveling at the speed and good time I was making. It’s times like this I do feel like I’m domestically gifted, and just as I was making my way down one of the final aisles, I encountered one of the sixty or so seniors doing their shopping too.

The woman smiled kindly at me, and I watched as her 90-something year old arm trembled as she attempted to reach something on a shelf that was just out of her arm’s reach. “Here,” I said, “let me help you. What can I get for you?” I smiled as I pulled the box of dark brown hair dye down from the shelf, and tried not to giggle as I saw wisps of her white and brown hair peeking beneath her scarf. “Good for you, Grandma,” I thought silently as I handed her the box. She studied it for a minute, and I was then instructed to remove two or three more boxes searching for the right shade of brown. Just as I thought we finally found it, I heard a loud commotion just behind me and a string of curse words.

Coming to a stop was an older man on a motorized scooter. My cart was stopped next to the old woman’s, blocking the man’s path. I quickly apologized and went to move the cart when the man said, “People are so damn inconsiderate!” I stopped behind my cart, turned, and asked the man to repeat himself. “You’re blocking the whole damn aisle.”

I stood there for a moment and considered hitting him in his fat, wrinkly head with a bottle of shampoo, and then had a quick daydream about kicking him off his store-borrowed rascal scooter (he didn’t look incapable of walking, he looked lazy). Instead, I just said, “I’m terribly sorry to have slowed you down and caused you such a terrible inconvenience as I helped this woman reach a product off a high shelf. To help you make up for lost time, let me just give you a heads up, the tampons and Midol are located in aisle 12 now.” He just glared at me, and to my delight, the old woman began to chuckle. We both had a hearty laugh as the lazy old man motored past us.

“What an asshole that old guy was!” I complained to my husband as I brought my bags inside. “I mean, I know we’ve had this conversation before, but I don’t care if you’re 4 years old or 70-something like this guy, just cause you’re old and maybe even disabled doesn’t mean you’re excused from acting like an asshole!”

Jake, overhearing the conversation, chimes in with “I learned that azz-hules on Dora are blue.”

I immediately stopped what I was doing and tried to process what he was saying. He then questions, “So some azz-hules are old and some of them are blue too?”

Then it clicked. “First, Jake, please don’t repeat my bad words. Don’t say asshole or ‘azz-hule‘ as you said. Secondly, it’s azul, and azul means the color blue.”

Jake, clearly irritated with me, just said, “well, people can be azul.”

“Yes, yes they can, Jake. People can be azuls…it’s a good life lesson. Oh, and why don’t you ask your brother about blue people.”

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Wanted: Professional Help

Posted by Domestic Diva at 5:08 pm Uncategorized

Sep 092010

I need Professional help. Many of you already know this, but yesterday, in the parking lot of Acme (my local grocery store), it became painfully obvious to me as well.

Yesterday morning started like most others, way too early and with a million things to do leaving me no time to ready myself for the day. I managed to wake up early enough to shower though, since I was making an extra effort to appear normal for Jake’s preschool orientation. I dressed up a bit more than usual too, again as part of the facade of being a functional adult.

Orientation went off without a hitch and Jake cried when it was time to go home (hopefully a good sign). We got home just before lunch, so our mid-day madness ensued with toys everywhere, jelly smears from the kitchen to the bathroom…and all down my shirt resulting from plucking Jake off the top of the kitchen table.

Having had enough, and not really even half way through my already long day, I cleaned Jake up, fed the baby and put them both down for naps. After changing my shirt and delivering the baby monitors to my husband’s home office, I was out to the grocery store before having to pick up Joey from Kindergarten.

It was still warm, but breezy yesterday, and after changing I put on a black short sleeved sweater from Ann Taylor. It was one of my favorite pre-pregnancy shirts that I hadn’t worn in quite some time. As I drove the five miles to the store, I wondered what could be itching against my back knowing it couldn’t be a tag on this previously worn shirt. Unfortunately, it was in the center of my upper back, and not wanting to crash my car, I decided to wait until I got out to remove the object from my sweater.

Upon arriving at Acme, with the clock in my mind ticking away, I forgot about the itch and ran into the store. I began my “Super Market Sweep” style shopping, and somewhere around aisle five, the itching resumed. Not being the only other customer, and not wanting to look like a complete lunatic in my small town’s grocery store, I was unable to really determine the cause of or resolve the itching. I adjusted my sweater and tried to ignore the persistent itch which now felt like a quarter sized lump of prickles. WTF was in my shirt?

I used the self checkout in hopes that it would be faster, but the constant movement from the cart to the scanning mechanism to the bag and back to cart was almost more than I could bear. My cell phone rang and I could barely walk and talk as I made my way to the car. I hung up the phone, loaded three bags in the Suburban, and no longer cared how ridiculous I looked, I needed to get what I now imagined was a tumble weed out of my sweater.

Looking similar, I imagine, to a dog chasing its own tail, I reached as far around my back as I could, grabbed the hard and crunchy object that was entangled in fabric of my sweater and pulled. I felt the object break and a portion came loose in my hand while the rest flung back with the clothing to further irritated my skin.

“What the AHHHHHHHHH!” I screamed. Did I say screamed? I meant I cried out loudly in sheer terror at the half crunched object in my hand. There, in the palm of my hand, was the upper torso, head, and one giant antenna of the most gargantuan and disgusting (dead) cricket I had ever laid eyes on. “It’s in my shirt!” I continued to yell and frantically reach at the remaining carcass. “Oh, God! I can’t get it! I can’t get it!” I continued to cry out in the parking lot of Acme.

A man, probably in his mid thirties, came running after hearing my pleas. He set his bags down and shook the back of my shirt. “It’s still in there! It’s touching me!” I wailed.

“What is it? A bee? Is something stinging you?” he asked. Before I could answer, and seeing the fear painted on my face, he reached his hand down the back of my shirt, felt around, and after what felt like a lifetime but must have only been a few seconds in reality, he pulled out the bottom half of the Jurassic sized cricket. The bottom half, which was perhaps the worst of the two halves, with it’s giant musical legs, was now in his hands and he began to closely inspected it.

“Uh, I think it’s just a cricket, Miss…” he said now looking slightly embarrassed.

Sensing the strangers awkwardness at the realization that the creature in question was just a cricket, I immediately came up with a lie. “Oh, thank God! All I saw was brown legs and I thought it was a wasp. I’m extremely allergic to bees. Oh, thank you! Thank you so much.”

The man, now obviously feeling slightly heroic again and not so much like a public groper, said it was no problem and he was happy to help. I didn’t know what to do at this point either, so I went to hug the stranger, but stopped half way. I then attempted to shake his hand but it was more like a high five.

Super awkward.

A small crowd (yes, crowd-kill me now) of about six people had gathered a couple parking spaces down, and the hero relayed to them that I was allergic to bees and had an insect in my shirt. They all nodded and one man shook his hand as he walked past.

At this point I wanted to abandon the rest of the bags and just drive home never to return to my local Acme again. Instead, I moved with incredible speed and loaded the bags as fast as I could. I nearly cried as I drove home wondering how far I should move to never see any of these people ever again.

Have I mentioned how small my town really is??

After unpacking the bags and hurrying over to Joey’s school to get a parking space, I had a few minutes upon arrival to really let this all sink in. I pondered, and not for long, how the cricket got into the sweater in the first place. My laundry room is in the basement, and this time of year (which is probably when I wore the sweater last), is infested with giant disgusting crickets. The basement is 85% finished, sealed, dry walled, etc. so my guess is these incredibly foul insects are getting in through the sump pump. There’s never any food down there, and I always see them in my laundry baskets, washer, dryer vent, etc. so my assumption is that they eat laundry as a primary food source.

So get the phone book, call the exterminator, I need professional help.

(UPDATE: Here’s a follow up post and why I might have to move)

Thanks for reading! Leave me a comment too! I’d love to hear what you think…do I need professional help?

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