Life

I don't know about you, but all this life is good/ I'm so lucky crap is getting a little annoying.

As hard as I try to look on the bright side and count my blessings, some days I just feel like dog doo-doo. A great psychologist friend of mine would tell me that it can be both: You can be grateful for life's gifts and feel like shit all at once. And I suppose that's just where I am.

Take this morning, for instance. I stayed up watching reruns until midnight - didn't even watch my favorite, Sex and the City. This seemed like a reasonable time to me since my alarm doesn't go off until almost 8 on summer mornings so I was getting the sleep this 40-something princess needs. The problem was my dear husband woke me at 6:15. He had something he just had to tell me, the dear. It couldn't wait. He got very close to my ear and whispered, "There's something wrong with the computer, honey." Huh? What? What's wrong?

"It smells like it's burning.

Bye. Have a good day."

Great. And good morning to you.

I managed to get him to unplug the whole power-bar thing before he left, so I could maybe squeeze in another hour of sleep without the thought of the whole system literally exploding. The problem with that, though, is that I have this very fancy power-bar thing that is battery operated to keep your system going during a power outage. And in order for the thing to let you know it's working hard, it beeps. Just like an alarm clock. Beep, beep, beep. 10 seconds later - beep, beep, beep.

Now, I'm a pretty heavy sleeper and I can tell you that I would have slept through that silly old beeping noise in a minute. I might have even incorporated the sound into my dreams like I had incorporated NPR's Steve Inskeep into a weird family camping dream the morning before. But the thing was that my cat, Felix, (click here to read more about Felix the Cat), had decided it was time for me to get up. And he is way more insistent than the computer's power-bar thing. Once he decides a person should be up, he becomes obsessed. And if the meowing next to my bed doesn't work, he'll jump up on my bed and nibble (OK, bite, really) my elbow. Or whatever body part is not unexposed by the sheets.

So, by 7 (I actually lived with the meowing and nibbling until then, I love sleeping in so much) Felix and I were downstairs fixing coffee and a plate of stinky cat food that he would, just moments later, reject. That was when I saw my clothesline full of soaking wet clothes that had been hanging out in the rain all night. Shit. Now we get rain. Near drought all summer. Dragging the hoses and sprinklers all over my property trying to prevent my grass from turning brown and all my beautiful flowers from dying and now it rains. I guess I should have been watching News 12, as local as local news gets, last night instead of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine pretends to be the janitor in a building across the street from her own so that she can order this fabulous crispy flounder from a local Chinese restaurant. (I know I've seen it at least 5 times already, but it is a funny episode. And Kristin Davis from the afore-mentioned SATC plays Jerry's love interest! An added bonus.)

So as happy and lucky as I feel that I have my health, my kids are healthy and generally happy, my husband has his job and we can pay our bills, and that our home is intact, some days are just tough. The summer weather has been beautiful and wonderful, but sometimes it rains - on your clean clothes. And sometimes your computer smells like it's burning.

Life is good. Life sucks. It can be both.