Hands off!

It has been one of those months again. One of those months where everyone wants a piece of you and you feel like you’re being torn apart as per ancient medieval custom.

Most of it is my own stupid fault of course. As the season finished, I was looking forward to oceans of available time . . . time that would be well spent this winter.

So, in a cheerful, happy, extremely blonde mood I started sketches for a new painting, scribbled the start of “The Draft for my Book," invited three of my youngest daughter's girlfriends for a weekly arts and crafts hour, put an ad in a local paper (you may all have heard of) to start some Greek classes, volunteered for a few committees, and suddenly found myself with less time on my hands then I had all summer.

I mean, Jeez, how blonde can one really be. This was a time we were supposed to relax! My schedule became as tight as the pair of jeans I wore at the premier of Saturday Night Fever.   

It wouldn’t have been all that bad if Murphy’s Law wouldn’t have started to raise its ugly head. If it can go wrong, it will. And we all know "Murphy" comes in threes.

First off, our computers started to act up. Something went bad between downloading music, playing games and the well known power cuts. Now, I don’t know what went wrong (neither did OTE, mind you), but it left us without the net for three weeks. Cold turkey for this family of addicts!

While trying to juggle the schedule so we could fit in hours and hours of phone conversations with the mighty OTE, we got hit by a plague of small flies. Somewhere in the fields behind our house a tiny momma fly and poppa fly decided to start a family. And they meant it! Our home was being invaded daily with new baby flies. We all agreed they had to go, which meant the schedule had to be juggled once again. An extra hour a day needed to be fit in to vacuum away those nasty buggers.

In the mean time, the washing machine started to act up. Clothes were coming out a little too wet. We didn’t pay that much attention, but boy, we should have, ‘cause, I’m telling you, today it all came together.

 While I was on call number three with our gracious phone company, my partner was sucking up flies when the vacuum cleaner gave in. Try to imagine me screaming my butt off to some ignoramus on the other side of the line, while he was battling the fly plague with bare hands.

Sitting on the floor in the middle of our living room, I tried to fix the vacuum when my man came in with a look of sheer terror on his face. He informed me that probably our washer had died on us too (number three this year).

That’s when I exploded . . . let me rephrase, that’s when I imploded.

My man must have understood. Armed, as usual, with loads of tools, some kind of technical diagram and a cup of coffee, he went back to the washer. Two hours later (I still hadn’t moved) he sat beside me on the couch smelling like a skunk in heat.

"It was a dirty job," he said, "but it’s turning and it’s pumping and I managed to put all the parts I had to take out, back in." He gazed at my previous vacuum fixing efforts, looked at all the parts and silently put it back together.

"There was just something stuck in the hose here sweetie," he mumbled, "and you know what? They just called; they’re coming from OTE to put us back online. Everything is ok”. It echoed in my head…….everything’s ok…… putting us back online.

Oh yes, y'all, everything really is fine and dandy now. And if you happen to run in to a guy in a bright coloured t-shirt that says MINE, then hands off . . . cause he really is mine!