What To Do With Myself When It’s All Over

What do you do with yourself when it’s all over? I mean, completely over. Totally over. The whole enchilada with guacamole and all the fixins. Well, hold on, I don’t mean death. I’m talking about when you have had so much going on for so long and suddenly, soon, it will all wrap up. My master’s degree is done, and within a couple of weeks, the years of planning and the 6 months of building on our new house addition will quite suddenly come to an end. Poof! And then what? THEN WHAT? It’s like empty nest syndrome. What will we talk about at the dinner table? Right now conversations turn to wood floors, paint or how in the world we’re going to get the 13 tons worth of stuff we jammed into a storage unit back to the house. (I think we should just stop paying on it and let them throw it all away.)

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The Walls Are Closing In

It was at that moment — that very instant — that I realized I would never be able to travel into space. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t hack the confined spaces — the cramped quarters. I would go mad, get pushed over the edge by one too many floating piles of space mail. I would fry a circuit and undoubtedly start yanking on the air lock door until I was sucked out into the infinite darkness screaming the whole way, “finally free!” What got me thinking this way? Well, we’ve reached the mission critical part of our house addition. We’re just a couple of weeks away from completion, which is exciting, but we’ve also hit that rough patch when walls that used to separate living quarters from the construction have come down. Now our house has really shrunk and it all seems to be closing in. It was tight before, but we’re now experiencing life as canned sardines. After a couple of days of living on top of each other while the drywall went in, I began to crack. “I just don’t understand why there are so many piles of stuff everywhere,” I complained. “It looks like the Himalayas in here.” My wife gave me the kind of look that screamed, “If we had a shrimp deveiner you’d be in so much trouble right now.”

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Crash Went the Conehead Dog

Crash went the conehead dog. Crash, scrape, bang, crunch, screech, scratch … scratch … scratch — those nails on plastic, sounding like a rat trying to claw through a plastic milk jug. Another crash, clunk, bam, slice … eeeyyyyooowww-OUCH! The “ouch” was the conehead dog’s lighting fast reaction to a morsel of food dropping beneath the table … lunging between chairs — and my legs — to get it … forgetting there was a plastic cone the size of a deep-space satellite dish rapped snuggly around her neck. Three layers of skin and a bushel of hair were instantly shaved from my leg. Stupid conehead dog! You know what a cone is? The kind you put on a dog when they have a wound that needs to heal? You can’t trust a dog with his or her wound. They don’t have the good sense to leave it alone and would just as soon lick their whole appendage off. In my dog’s case, she had stitches on the top of her noggin and along the elbow of her front leg. A couple things had to be removed and biopsied. Turns out she’s fine. Expensive, but fine.

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Moving Mom and 60 Years Worth of … Chairs

There’s this wonderful line in the movie version of “Annie” when a flustered and frustrated Miss Hannigan (played by Carol Burnett) grumbles at the little ruffians, “Why any kid would want to be an orphan is beyond me.” I was thinking about that line this past weekend — tinkering and changing it a bit as I loaded box upon box, chair upon chair, tchotchke upon tchotchke into two trucks that were as long as a city block. “Why anyone would want to move is beyond me?” I mumbled to myself in the best Miss Hannigan voice I could muster. I now understand why people choose to stay in one place their entire lives. I used to think it kind of strange and lacked a sense of adventure — a taste for change. But then again, I’ve been in my house for more than a decade and wouldn’t leave if gangrene-ridden crickets tried to flush me out. Now I know why: I hate moving.

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