Late night musings

In my days (and there have been some 7,750 of them), I have learned a few very wise things. Don't yield at stop signs, even when it's midnight, and there is clearly no other traffic, because there might be a car, one single car, and if there is, it is probably a cop. Also, don't accept jobs at Montessori schools when your stomach feels like you have ingested a bucket of paint thinner, or a Costco sized container of mayonnaise. Also, forest green does not look well with turquoise, no matter how free spirited you are. Most recently, this profundity has entered my canon of wisdom: it is a very foolish thing to eat breakfast cereal in the vicinity of expensive computer hardware. It was Mae who proved this prudent. I was eating my Corn Chex, checking my email, nursing my child, and minding my own business, when Mae, with one of those quick and efficient baby jabs, upset my bowl right onto the keyboard. Milk went everywhere. All between the keys, beneath the mouse, under the printer, down my shirt front, down Mae's cheek, and into her ear. (There were multiple sorts of milk involved in that summary.) In short, the majority of our keyboard was debilitated. (7890-=,uiop[jkl;',./the arrow keys, the enter button, and the space bar, to be specific.) Would you guess that the pendulum of function for our entire lives hung in the hands of a keyboard? A seemingly benign and clickity bit of plastic gone wrong turned the pleasant order of our lives into sheer chaos and down right inconvenience! Our bank accounting and bills were out of our control, certain important emails were inaccessible, we couldn't plan our budget, we were Googless, helpless, hopeless. I have taken the keyboard for granted quite foolishly in the past. Those days are over. As I haunted D.I. for days, hoping to find an emergency replacement keyboard, I became fairly well acquainted with two truths: one, if you are in need of a Halloween costume, D.I. has an endless supply of ugly dresses with shoulder pads in stock right now, and two, the only kind of keyboards they have at D.I. are the kind with the wrong cord and grimy keys. These have their purpose. You can give them to small children to play with, or you can dangle them from your porch to terrify your germ conscious friends and neighbors this Halloween season. But you cannot plug them into an iMac, and return to happiness and normality.

But, due to certain miraculous circumstances, we were able, at last, to buy a new keyboard. The newest and sexiest model of keyboard on the Apple market today. It is flat, (I've made thicker pancakes, I tell you) and metallic, and smooth, and according to a sincere promise from a guy with a lisp at the BYU bookstore who was apparently eager to make the sale, it will be absolutely fine if, perchance, milk were to spill all over it. (I thay, nobody could promith any thuch thing.) It is ironic, I thought, as our debit card passed into our thinthere friend's hands, that Ben and my underwear is grey and decrepit, our pants have holes in the knees, our cabinets are full of ramen noodles, and our vehicles are loitering outside with expired registrations, because we can't afford to do anything about it, and yet, the instant we can't use the computer, we go out and make a weighty purchase to set things right.

In my days, I have learned a few very wise things. And one of them is this: in some cases, dear friends and associates, it is alright to cry over spilled milk.

Eirene