How I Spent the Past Hour — or, I swear I’m going insane.

Exactly one hour ago, I decided to take a shower. I was planning to take one a few hours ago, but as the following account completely typifies pretty much every hour of every day, you will deduce why I did not.

In any case, an hour ago I decided to finally take a shower. So I went in my bedroom and got undressed.

But then I heard the dog bark once outside, and I realized I had left the porch door open for him to go out and hadn’t closed it yet. I like that the dog can go outside on a sunny day, and he’s very good out there, unless the neighbors let their dogs too. Then my dog barks like a banshee because he can’t see or get to the neighbor dogs to play, though it’s the one thing in the world he desires more than any other. This barking thing — my dog goes outside, the neighbor dogs hear him and beg to go outside too, the neighbors let them out not knowing that my dog is out, then my dog starts barking and the neighbor has to take their dogs in— has become a ritual, the kind that makes me seriously consider moving out of my neighborhood to a remote mountain cabin where I will no longer have any neighbors to bother. But then I think about bears and mountain lions eating my dog, and I figure that’s perhaps not the best solution and I should just get my dog into training, though I don’t really know what they would do to help me stop his barking because he can’t see the neighbor dogs through the big wooden fence. But if I knew what to do, then I would do it, which is why I pay other people to tell me, right? Gosh, but the training classes fall at such difficult times for me to make.

Anyway, I digress. So I was undressed, ready to turn the shower on, when I heard the dog bark outside. I put on a robe to go downstairs and bring the dog in and close the door. When I got down there, the dog was sitting peacefully in a patch of sunlight and I didn’t have the heart to call him in. So I figured I’d make a cup of coffee, and maybe then the dog will have moved and I’ll want to bring him in.

I went to the sink and saw a pile of garlic next to it that I had pulled from the yard earlier. I figured I really should get to cleaning it, it wouldn’t take more than a minute or so. But first, the coffee. I turned, and saw a package of bread mix on the counter. “Hey,” I thought, “I should mix that up and let it be rising while I’m in the shower, and when I get out I can put it in the oven and have fresh buns for lunch.” So I picked up the package and saw that it needed three “room temperature” eggs. Well, there went my plans to use time “efficiently” (the irony of that statement does not elude me!), because my eggs were cold. So I took three eggs out of the fridge and set them with the box next to the stove, almost on top of an HVAC flyer I’d gotten in the mail yesterday.

“Oh that’s right, I was going to call these people to fix my air conditioner. I shouldn’t keep putting that off, I’m going to do that right now!” So I did. Scheduled for tomorrow. Yay, that’s done. OOps, I was going to make coffee, wasn’t I?” So I went to the sink to grab my cup from this morning, but instead picked up a mug that I had pulled out of my brand new dishwasher that I had had to wash again because it hadn’t gotten clean. I thought, while I was on the subject of making phone calls, that I should really call the plumber and see if perhaps the dishwasher might not be getting enough pressure, just like the upstairs shower pressure has decreased the past few months. So, I made the phone call.

The plumber had me take photos of the upstairs shower fixture and email them to him, and so after the call while I was on my smart phone doing that, I decided to check twitter and email on my phone. An email popped up that I felt would be easier to read on my computer, so I went to my office and saw an open window which reminded me that I was going to track down a link in a blog that I accidentally navigated away from, so while I had that fresh in mind I decided to do that before I forgot how to get back to the blog. I found it, then decided to check my facebook game while I was on my computer, since my “contracts” were coming due to “collect.” (World of Wonder, in case anyone else plays and wants to be my neighbor and would help me get my Macchu Picchu built, lol!)

Did that, then saw yesterday’s coffee mug next to the computer and remembered I was going to make coffee. Went downstairs and the dog was still outside and the door was still open, though the dog had come inside. I shut the door, then went to the sink for the coffee cup. The garlic was still there, so I quickly washed it and cut off the roots. Then I put water in the cup and put it in the microwave. As the water heated in the microwave, I saw the eggs on the counter next to the stove, on top of the HVAC brochure, and suddenly realized that I was standing in my kitchen still in my robe, had not yet taken a shower, and a full hour had gone by.

I swear I am going insane.

Dangit, lookit me, I’m sitting in my robe now writing a blog post. Still no shower. And now it’s almost TWO hours gone by!

I promise, I’m getting up to do it now. But first, I’ve gotta collect those contracts, right?   🙂