E 5 L .........

This is one of those stories I really shouldn't tell about myself. I shouldn't even have told Hubby. I should just keep it inside, relieved to know that no one else witnessed my stupidity. But no.

In a show of supreme self-confidence, to demonstrate just how high my self-esteem is, to acknowledge in a very public way that my three college degrees sometimes appear to have been wasted time and money, I have to tell you the mistake I made yesterday morning.

First a little background.

Our new bedroom suit (you know, the one that caused us to have to make $10,000 renovations on our house and it's now a two-bedroom instead of a three-? Yeah, that one) has a HUGE headboard/bookcase/mirror combination (it even has a compartment for WINE, for Pete's sake). It makes it impossible to sit up in bed and read, but that's beside the point. There is an open section (for books, I presume) right behind our pillows, and this is where Gus has decided he likes to sleep. He goes to sleep on the end of the bed, but after everyone has sufficiently settled down for the night, he makes his way to the headboard and proceeds to make a lot of noise carving himself out a place to lie down. Sometimes I think the carving is literal.

Night before last, sometime in the middle of the night, Gus managed to pull the clock off the shelf above his lair. I put it back on its shelf and went back to sleep.

When I was getting ready for my bike ride yesterday, I walked in the bedroom and looked at the clock. It had a very strange error message on it.

E 5 L.

E 5 L? What the hell is THAT?

That damn dog. He's broken my clock. And I really LIKED that clock. It has a wonderful feature on it whereby you can silence the alarm but not turn it off. Therefore you don't have to remember to turn it back on every day. (What you DO have to remember is to turn it OFF for the weekend. Only takes a couple of 5:00 AM Saturday wake-ups to get in THAT habit.) I guess you could consider it a 24-hour snooze button. The button even has a little indention in it, so you can feel whether or not you're on the right button. Just in case your dog has a habit of moving the clock in the night.

E 5 L. My poor clock.

I wondered what kind of error message that could be and whether or not it could be fixed. I become attached to things, and I have had this little clock for several years. I know I can get a new one relatively inexpensively, but I have a RELATIONSHIP with that clock. I want THAT one.

But now it's E 5 L.

Those of you who are smarter than I (which is possibly every single person reading this post) have probably already figured out my mistake.

E 5 L isn't an error message.

It's what a digital clock reads at 7:53. If the clock is upside-down.

Time to Come Out of the Closet.......

In spite of the title, this blog post has nothing to do with anyone's sexual orientation. It is appropriate, though, so I chose to use it.

Hubby and his buddies -- "Vince," "Wally," "Jake," and "JT" -- went on a golfing trip this past weekend. Because five of them stayed together, that meant someone had to sleep on the sofa. Jake, being the youngest of the crew (by a long, long shot), drew sofa duty. That has (almost) nothing to do with this story.

Hubby and JT were asleep in one of the bedrooms when Jake came stumbling in. He opened the closet door, went in, and closed the door back. Then he came out, bumped Hubby's bed with his knee (which awoke Hubby - he's a very light sleeper), went BACK in the closet, and shut the door again. At some point he removed Hubby's new golf shirt from a hanger (he had to unbutton it in the dark, because being new, it was buttoned all the way to the top), brought it out of the closet, and laid it on top of JT's clothes that were piled in a chair.

This pretty much freaked JT out, so he got up and went to get Vince and Wally. (I'm not really sure what he thought they could do about it.) JT told Hubby, "Jake is having some kind of seizure!" The three men came back into Hubby's room and looked in the closet.

"He's not in there," one of them said. Probably skeptically, if I had to guess.

Hubby said, "No, he went that way."

They found him in the kitchen, in a different closet.

Poor guy. Can you IMAGINE the ribbing he has taken about this incident? They finally succeeded in waking him up, and someone steered him back to the sofa.

He must have a pretty good sense of humor. He texted Hubby last night to say he told his wife about it, and she was STILL laughing.

I'll bet he's hoping someone else does something really stupid. And soon.

A Dollar in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush.....

There's a funny story that has circulated among my family members for years. I have no idea whether or not it's true, but it's funny enough to repeat even if it isn't. But I really, really, really, really hope it's true. So we'll say it is.

My mother worked at a company where they took their breaks at scheduled times. You didn't just go take a smoke break any old time you wanted it, because that meant one less person running a machine or packaging fruitcakes, and the whole dang system would break down.

One day one of her co-workers started for the break room with a dollar in her hand. On her way, she stopped off at the restroom.

When she reached the break room and started to use the vending machine, all she had in her hand was toilet paper.