meltdown

I have been feeling good lately, but today I turned into a wind-up toy.

The day got started with poop, which spelled backwards, is still poop. I'll spare the details, but it took five shots with a plunger and a snake to return my son's bathroom to working condition. Poop is the gift that keeps on giving.

This got me thinking about Christmas. Why? Because the toilet downstairs doesn't work either. It hasn't since the Sewage Spill of 2009. And my mother in law will be staying in our basement when she comes, so we need a working toilet.

Then I got to thinking about the Christmas dinner menu, and shopping for it. My mother and sister are bringing main dishes, which will be great. Bruce the decider is a good cook, but hasn't in awhile, so I usually do it, and he cleans up afterward.

I asked him, since he has veto power in our house, what he had in mind for our contribution to the holiday meal. He said side dishes and dessert. For some reason, I chose today to nail down some particulars. I'm already making a salad. He says he wants a "starch", sweet potatoes, a veggie dish and three pies.

Starch is covered. Rice. Sweet potatoes? Pulled a recipe from the net. Veggie dish? It's ten days until the Big Day, but I start flying through the cookbooks, and finally land on a recipe for Ratatouille, a vegetable casserole. Three pies?! Do we really need that many? Yes, he says, we do, as there will be eleven people, so again, I go surfing the net and flying through cookbooks, and decide on pumpkin, lemon, and we'll buy and apple.

Maybe I'm just using my bad brain as a crutch, but I became overwhelmed by thinking of the ingredients I need to buy, trying to avoid other shoppers, since I have a new aversion to big crowds. As this happens, I work up to a five-star fuss, about an event I'm co-producing 10 days from now! So typical of me.

I finally calmed down, but it took some doing. This is a wonderful, but crazy time.