If you ask me, that’s how the Biblical creation story really ought to go. I am, as I’ve mentioned before, addicted to TaB soda. Back when we lived in Hawaii, I had to have TaB shipped to me and made everyone who visited bring it with them.

VH secretly suspects that the reason I insisted on moving back to Kansas was so I could have an unfettered supply of the stuff, and he’s not entirely wrong. Unfortunately, thanks to a bonehead taking over the Commissary at Ft. Leavenworth, my supply ran out.

Until today.

Today, my friend Kim sent me TaB. Four 12-packs of it, as a matter of fact. That’s forty-eight little pink cans full of heaven, all (but one) of them now safely locked away in my desk.

I’m so happy I could pee.

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Back in December, VH and I decided to get our eyes examined. I was 3 years overdue for a new glasses and contact prescription, and he’d reached the point where he couldn’t read the newspaper without growing longer arms. It was time, and the timing was good, too: we knew insurance might not cover all of the expense, so we wanted to get our exams done in time to deduct them on our taxes.

Fortunately — or so we thought — there was an eye doctor just down the road that not only offered exams but also sold glasses and contacts. We’d seen their building go up a year or so ago, and since then we’d driven past the sign announcing Drs. Norris & Kelly’s services almost daily.

VH went first, and being the cheap man that he is he declined all of the “optional” exam bling like baseline documentation. When it turned out that he only needed reading glasses, in a strength available at Wal-Mart, he figured he’d get them there.

I’m not so lucky: I have horrible eyesight. I had all the bling tests done and had both a contact and eyeglass exam. (Which, incidentally, I had no idea were separate things and still am not sure about.) I picked out a pair of glasses, ordered 6 months of contacts and paid for all but my eye exam.

Since I’d read our Tricare Standard insurance documents that very morning which listed among their family member benefits: “Physical examinations, including eye examinations, and immunizations.” So, I asked Dr. Norris and Dr. Kelly’s office to bill the insurance (which they said wouldn’t pay) and told them I’d pay for the exams myself if insurance didn’t cover it.

A couple of weeks ago, I got two bills from the eye doctors, Drs. Norris and Kelly, in the mail. Both are for $170, one for VH’s exam and one for mine. (Apparently my contact lens exam and base documentation — whatever that is — were included in the $462 I already paid them).

One-hundred and seventy dollars for an eye exam seems outrageously expensive to me, so I called their office thinking that perhaps they’d accidentally billed us twice.

Amanda, the woman answering the phone, said their eye exams are $86. When I asked why I’m being billed $170 for them she claimed that the $86 is for people who pay same-day, but if they have to bill insurance it’s more.

They charge my insurance company more than they charge me? Why, that sounds like fraud to me, I replied.

She justified the difference on the basis of all of the paperwork they have to fill out. (Apparently pushing “submit” on the computer is awfully hard work. Maybe I ought to set up a business in that line of work, eh??)

So, why wasn’t I told there’d be a different fee?

Umm… well… That’s right, she didn’t have a good answer.

But I do: I intend to get in touch with Tricare to find out why their fee wasn’t covered, then I intend to tell Tricare that they’re being billed almost twice what patients are being charged face-to-face for the same service.

And then, as I explained to snippy Amanda, I will never go back to eye doctors Drs. Norris and Kelley on 2301 10th Avenue in Leavenworth, Kansas (at http://drsnorrisandkelly.com/) for eye exams, glasses or contact lenses ever again.

But first I’m going to save someone else a ridiculously high charge for eye exams by hitting a “submit” button to post this.

I’m short. I’ve always been short and I always will be. Now that I’m in my 40s, I’ve had to also accept that I’m just going to get shorter… which is almost unimaginable for someone barely 5′2″.

For years I’ve had to live with the knowledge that the typical male fantasy involves women of Amazonian height… women whose legs are, let’s face it, as long as I am tall. Until my daughter grew taller than me, I had to endure the humiliation of standing on step-stools to get glasses out of my kitchen cupboards. Soon I’ll be asking my 7-year-old to fetch the flour from the top shelf for Mommy because he’s closing in on my height, too.

In other words, I’ve spent the majority of my life with my nose at most folks’ armpit level, being bumped and jostled in crowds, having to wad my coat and sit on it in movie theaters and enduring numb legs thanks to most bar stools being so high my feet can’t touch the floor. Being short has, needless to say, pissed me off quite a few times.

So it’s no surprise to me that a recent study shows short women may live longer than the rest of you.

In fact, given my fondness for sharp, shiny things, it makes perfect sense: my face is right at your chest-height and you can’t see me coming.

Remember that the next time one of you overgrown mutants feels tempted to ask “How’s the weather down there?” M’kay?

A while back, I wrote that VH and I have been thinking about hiring professionals to handle the 8mm film to DVD transfer of some of his oldest family home movies. Naturally, half of our friends have since volunteered to handle the transfer for free — or, more accurately, in exchange for a few beers. They can’t, for the life of them, understand why we aren’t eagerly accepting their offers.

The thing is that we want it done right — without fingerprints or improper projectors damaging our old films. That’s something our friends find incomprehensible; that even after the film to DVD transfer we’d still want to keep the old films. No reason — we just do.

Besides which, most of our friends are offering to run the films through their old Super8 VHS cameras… which sounds like a practical idea but photography and film experts say will lead an inferior reproduction. (Which, meanwhile, might have damaged our originals.)

So earlier today when I mentioned to one of our volunteer-friends that I’d finally finished readying the reels for a film to video transfer, he lectured me once again on spending money for a professional service when I’ve got friends ready to handle the matter for me for free.

That’s when I reminded him that a few years ago when his wife filed for divorce, I wasn’t the lawyer he turned to for help even though I probably wouldn’t have charged him more than a few martinis. It’s funny how fast things like that make people shut up.

Sorry for the accidental posting of something that was supposed to be a future entry, along with the rearranging of an entry that I’d meant to post earlier so it wouldn’t remain at the top of the page for the rest of the day.

The fact that these two hiccups occurred should tell you what kind of a Monday I’m having.

How’s yours going?

Have you caught that new show, “Moment of Truth”? I’ve watched a total of 3 minutes of it simply because I sat down to watch the evening news on Fox a few minutes too early. Even those brief moments were more than I could stomach: I turned the TV off and checked email while waiting for the news to start.

I find nothing entertaining about watching someone squirm as they’re asked embarrassing questions while a polygraph measures their truthfulness. Oh, I understand the premise well enough: they wouldn’t be going through such humiliation if they weren’t interested in making money. But, as far as I’m concerned, the only differences between that show and, say, Jerry Springer is that fists don’t fly and someone besides Jerry makes a little cash out of the whole mess.

Of the people I know who avidly watch the show, most say they feel a thrill, a sense of vindication when one of the contestants gets discovered in a lie. They talk about the woman who was asked by her ex-boyfriend whether she’d leave her husband for him, and she said that she would. But that’s not what led her to being buzzed off the show. No, her moment came when she was asked “Do you think you’re a good person?” and she answered “Yes.” Her brain, like anyone else’s would, knew it was lying.

Besides wrecking marriages, the show has also renewed discussion about the nature of lying itself: whether it’s always a bad thing, particularly when the truth itself can do so much damage sometimes. One author has capitalized on the moment to launch a new book studying lies women tell, and her belief that women make better liars than men.

Anyone surprised by that assertion?

I thought not.

Lying and fulfilling the social expectations of “femininity” seem to go hand in hand. As early as childhood, little girls learn to present a front that doesn’t necessarily reflect their true feelings: Hush, sweetie. Play with your dolls while the grownups talk, Princess. Meanwhile, as the saying goes, boys will be boys so no one really expects them to sit still while nearby adults ignore them.

By the time we are preteens we know three “truisms” about womanhood: guys like girls with big boobs, blonds have more fun, and girls with glasses never get asked to dance first. We start stuffing our training bras, begging for highlights and squinting through class if our parents won’t get us contacts.

But, really, think about those things: bras make boobs look perkier than they naturally are; highlights falsify hair color; and contacts disguise vision problems. They’re all lies, too. (Don’t even get me started on the subject of makeup and curling irons.)

We learn, too, that those lies work. People fall for them or at least pretend they aren’t being deceived. As we grow up, we also learn that lies help us avoid conflict by making others feel better about themselves and, as a result, about us, too.

We also grow angry people who don’t lie to us to make us feel better: bosses who fire us for not performing up to par on our jobs, spouses who leave because we stopped trying to capture their interest, friends who break off relationships because they’ve outgrown us. Agnes Reppelier once said, “There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.”

Maybe it’s because I am a woman that I see lying as intrinsic, to some extent, to nurturing: to protecting and sheltering others until they’re ready to hear the real truth; to cosseting the feelings of those with whom we’re not intimate and, yes, even sometimes the egos of those we know better than anyone else. Maybe that’s why women lie as readily as we allegedly do, but who’s to say that’s a bad thing?

Personally, I’m a little tired of our recent obsession with the “truth”. With reality shows. With talk shows. With sordid confessions on YouTube and tell-all memoirs.

I miss the days when you couldn’t Google someone you’d just met and find out everything about them in 30 minutes or less. I miss the slow progression of getting to know someone, and how the growing closeness between two people could be measured by the unveiling of truths they’d grown willing to share.

So tell me, folks, do these pants make me look fat? It’s okay, you can be honest with me. I promise I won’t get mad.

My husband, as you may have picked up by now, is not known for researching his facts before spouting off his opinion. I’d let that bother me, but the fact is his habit only ensures that I’m right more often than not. I, you see, tend to research stuff.

So the other day, VH opined that if we had the extra cash we should consider taking out life insurance policies on various aging celebrities.

Mick Jagger, for instance, is 64 years old now — given all of his boozing and carousing in earlier years, surely he’s due to drop dead soon. (Keith Richards, on the other hand, looks as if he died long ago but has yet to realize it.) Heck, Jack Nicholson’s getting up there in years, too, and now that his salivary glands are kaput it can’t be long before the rest of him follows.

Now, although investing in life insurance for seniors sounds like it would be a rather lucrative deal, VH refused to believe that he can’t just go taking out insurance policies on strangers willy-nilly. Which meant that I had to prove it to him, and that meant that once again I was right.

Know what else it meant?

It meant that my husband — who’s forever searching for ways to get rich quick that aren’t actually scams — now wants to take out life insurance on his folks, both of whom are in their early 70s. As their son he does, after all, have an insurable interest.

Wouldn’t you know that moments after we had this discussion his mother called to inform us when they’ll be visiting next month. Note the word choice there, folks: we were told when to expect their arrival.

Suddenly, I think my husband’s idea to insure his mother’s life might just be one of the better notions he’s come up with in quite some time.

Ever since last June when my daughter turned 16 years old, she’s told anyone who’ll listen that I am the World’s Meanest Mother. You see, despite her regular begging, I put off taking her to get her driver’s license. As far as I’m concerned, a child who can’t remember to bring her laundry downstairs before it sprouts furry green mold can’t be trusted to remember things like paying attention to stop lights, speed limits and traffic laws.

Unfortunately, her father has far more faith in her memory than I do. He’s also the World’s Greatest Dad — or at least he was for the 24 hours after he took her to get her driver’s license in December. Now that he won’t buy her a car, well, he’s getting a taste of what I endured for six solid months.

The thing is, now that she is officially a teen driver there are some good solid reasons to go ahead and get her a car of her own. Those Taco Bell runs I’m fond of making late on Saturday nights would be infinitely easier if I could get my kid to do them for me. Also, I have a half-dozen boxes of things I want to donate to Goodwill, but I’ve been too lazy to take them myself. Loading them into my kid’s car would increase the likelihood of getting the crud out of my house and into someone else’s.

But it’s not all about me. Some of my motivations actually benefit others, too. See, my daughter lives with her father and step-mother over 2 hours from our house. Giving the kid a car of her own would save hours of driving each weekend if they could just point her toward the others’ house and let her schlep herself back and forth. It’d save VH hours of driving her back on Sunday afternoons, too. Generous, aren’t I?

So the other day when my daughter started begging my husband to buy a car for her, I wholly supported the notion. With one caveat: she’d have to agree to let us put in a gps tracking device so we’d know about her driving habits.

Much to my surprise, she readily agreed. Then I realized why: she doesn’t understand just how accurate GPS tracking systems are are. She has no idea that the vehicle tracking devices can pinpoint a car’s location to within 6 feet, which is why GPS car tracking has helped law enforcement solve murder cases. (See the video demonstrating a GPS vehicle tracking system’s accuracy.)

She also doesn’t understand that, in addition to real-time reporting, we can review a historical record of where she’s been, how long she stayed there, and how fast she drove between locations. All of which, when you think about it, is much like having a parent in the car with her — but without the nagging.

So even though my husband and I have not yet agreed on whether to buy her a car, we have agreed that if we do the very first thing we’ll do is install a GPS tracking key. Then we’ll sit down with my daughter and explain to her the wealth of information we’ll be able to access.

Oh, I know there are some folks who think that’s all a bit Orwellian. We prefer to think of it as helping our daughter become a more responsible driver by using the GPS system to hold her accountable for her actions. We can’t always ride along with her, but we can ensure that she knows we might as well be.

Last fall I finally broke down and replaced the cheap knife set VH and I bought shortly after we were married. In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t have bothered for another few months but I found a great deal on a Ginsu knife set at Amazon.

Yeah, I know: Ginsu knives??? Didn’t they used to run a commercial showing a chef tossing a watermelon into the air then slicing it cleanly in two? Weren’t they proud of the fact their knives could cut an aluminum can in half yet still remain sharp enough to make paper-thin tomato slices?

Yeah, those are the ones. They’re every bit as impressive as the commercials depict, too. After 9 years of using crappy ones, I’d forgotten what good, sharp knives were like. I’ve been pampering my set ever since, too: we wash them by hand and dry them immediately, and I sharpen my Santoro-style knife before each use. That sucker’s so sharp it can cut through paper.

As I discovered tonight, it can also cut through fingers. Well, not entirely through a finger, but that’s probably because my fingernail slowed it down.

So. One quick trip to the hospital and four stitches later I’ve decided we won’t be having chicken enchiladas for dinner after all, mostly because I can’t find the other half of my fingernail. But, hey, at least it’s a clean cut, right?

Ever receive an email that’s so intrusive and inappropriate that it just begs for a scathing response, so you clear your calendar, turn the phone ringer off and tell your kid that he’s welcome to play video games for the next hour while you sit down and write a reply so full of snark as to make the recipient think you could very well be the love child of Truman Capote and Oscar Wilde, were such a thing possible…

… and then you realize that you misread the original email altogether and it’s not nearly as out-of-line as you thought?

So, that’s how my day’s going. How’s yours?

Pete Geren, the Secretary of the Army is visiting Fort Leavenworth today. VH is, at some point, attending a reception and may even be meeting Mr. Geren. That possibility has been making me chuckle all day.

Why?

Well, since I’m still playing “catch up” on laundry after being so sick last week, VH was out of clean briefs. So, under his business attire he’s wearing a pair of personalized boxers I had made for him as a joke. They read: “Notice: Privates under Kate’s command.”

Yeah, I’ve got a sick sense of humor.

Antibiotics rock. Seriously, I’d begun to think I was never going to feel better again, but four days of horse-sized pills and plenty of bed rest did the trick.

Just in time to watch one of the best Super Bowl games, ever, too. Unfortunately, I was already nodding off again midway through the celebrity pre-game interviews. (Which reminds me: is it just my imagination or is the top of John Travolta’s head getting smaller every year?) Didn’t snooze for long, though: with both VH and the Big-Eyed Boy rooting for the Giants there was plenty of hollering around the Venomous Household.

Now I just need to get caught up on email, dishes, laundry, dusting, vacuuming and emptying the cat boxes. Oh, and blogging, of course!

What have you been up to in my absence?

Just when I thought I’d kicked that flu that had me down all last week, it came back and kicked me, instead. I’m staying in bed, folks. Sorry — but I’m just too worn out right now to think about doing much more than whimpering in my sleep.

After 48 hours of 102+ fever and a lung-searing cough that just won’t quit, I feel like crap warmed over. The good news is that my fever broke sometime last night and, for the most part, I’m up and functioning again.

The bad news is that I have a gazillion emails to catch up on, five blogs that haven’t been updated in days, a kid who has been so bored watching Mommy sleep that he’s actually begging to do homeschool lessons today, and a house that looks like tornado hit it.

Meanwhile, despite having slept all but perhaps four hours since Tuesday, I still feel exhausted. Must be from all of those Nyquil-induced dreams about chasing George Clooney with a roll of duct tape while Cindy Crawford asked me for makeup tips. Man, that Nyquil is good stuff.

If I figure out who’s responsible for infecting me with the flu I’m gonna kick the snot out of them. Just as soon as I rest up.

I have the flu.

Talk amongst yourselves.

This year VH and I will celebrate our 10th anniversary, and I’m still not sure what we’re going to do to celebrate it. Ordinarily, we don’t make much of a fuss when our day comes around: we go out to dinner and sometimes see a movie. Oh, and we show each other anniversary cards at Wal-Mart without buying. It’s weird, I know, but its a tradition for us and it cracks us up.

But since 10 is one of those milestone anniversaries, I want to do something special but I’m not very good at coming up with ideas. (I’m kind of the reason we read cards at Wal-Mart.) Yes, I could ask VH for his ideas about celebrating our anniversary but I’d rather surprise him. After all, I’ve had to live with ten long years of getting teased about forgetting to buy an anniversary card for him on our very first anniversary.

My sister-in-law has a knack for coming up with amazing ideas to celebrate big days. On her husband’s 40th birthday, for instance, she rented a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud that was made in 1958, the year of his birth, and the two of them rode around in style that night. For my father-in-law’s 70th birthday she gave him a flying lesson. To this day he still talks about how he got to fly a plane all by himself.

The trick, she says, is to find gift experiences that appeal to a secret side of a person. Her husband, for instance, is a penny-pincher so she treated him to something he’d always denied himself: luxury. My father-in-law, due to health issues, has had to play things safe for several years. A flying lesson gave him the adventure he hadn’t known in quite some time. For both of them the gift was memorable because it’s something they’d never do for themselves.

Something VH and I would never do for ourselves: go somewhere crazy. We don’t do wild, spontaneous things anymore. It’s hard to when you’re busy homeschooling a 7-year-old and don’t have family living nearby. So I’ve been looking at all sorts of extraordinary gift ideas and trying to find a trip we could take alone together to somewhere so exciting, so remarkable that we’ll be talking about it for years to come.

I think I might actually have found it, too: an Arctic adventure in Sweden that includes dinner under the glowing lights of the Aurora Borealis, an experience day on a dog sled with an overnight at a Musher’s lodge, a snow mobile tour and — this is my favorite part — a night’s lodging at the famous Ice Hotel.

That’s right: a hotel built every December out of ice from the Torne River which which melts away in April. You probably saw something like it in the Bond movie “Die Another Day”, but that ice palace — although based on the Ice Hotel in Sweden - was actually made of plastic.

It’s not just the hotel’s walls that are made out of ice. Everything is: the beds you sleep on, to artwork hanging on the walls, the cocktail glasses at the Absolut Icebar at the hotel and even the chapel where people can get married… or renew their wedding vows.

I can certainly see plenty of opportunities to get romantic on the trip, what with all that cuddling under blankets while dog sledding, sharing a sleeping bag for two at the Ice Hotel and staring at the Northern Lights together. I’m also pretty certain he’d never think to travel to the Arctic circle on his own and probably doesn’t know there really is an Ice Hotel.

We’ve both got passports and I’ve got plenty of time to save up for and buy the tickets. I just want to make sure it’s the right idea before I spring for what’s undoubtedly going to be a bit pricier than anything I’d find at Wal-Mart.

So what do you think, folks? Would that be amazing enough to make it a memorable 10th anniversary?

Last month, I posted three separate entries about the 17 days it took for a 2-day package to arrive via DHL Express.

I was not, as you can imagine, a happy camper. However, once the package arrived I forgot completely about the problem and went on to give my husband the delayed birthday present I’d ordered him. DHL in Kansas City apparently did not forget about the problem, though.

This evening, while I was running around making dinner and wearing my “I’m-carrying-10-pounds-of-excess-water” scummy clothes and granny glasses, my hair looking crappy after last night’s disastrous salon appointment and not a scrap of makeup hiding my monthly breakout, the doorbell rang.

Greg F., the Regional Manager for DHL in this area, had driven all the way to our town to apologize for the service problem. You could have picked my pimpled jaw up off the floor, I was that stunned. He was downright nice and careful to tell me that the delivery driver had not been completing his route, a problem of which the (now-former) manager was not aware. It was, he said, something that never should have happened and he was very sincere about how much effort the company is putting into improving their customer service.

Let me just say now, folks, that the fact he drove so far out of his way to deliver a personal apology truly amazes me. Yes, bad service happens with any company, but such sincere, personal gestures of contrition don’t.

It was, by far, the most impressive effort I’ve ever seen a company make to take responsibility for a mistake and demonstrate their intent to do better in the future.

Thank you, DHL.

My husband, I like to tell him, would be lost without me. After all, I am the one who knows where all missing things can be found: his keys (beneath the wool hat he tossed onto the kitchen counter), his cell phone (invariably underneath the driver’s seat in his car), the TV remote (probably in the crack between sofa cushions). I am also the one who regularly has to tell him the location of his head and does so quite often, moreso at certain times of the month than at others.

Recently when a newly single girlfriend of mine was over, VH passed through our living room right as she asked “Given how different the two of you are how have you managed to stay married?” It’s a question we both get a lot from people who haven’t spent much time around us as a couple, which she had not because her ex-husband was a bit of a control freak whereas mine is not. (That’s my job.)

As I explained to her, neither VH nor I believe in divorce. Taking out no medical life exam insurance policies behind each other’s backs, yes. But divorce? Most definitely not.

It dawned on me today, however, that if something were to happen to me (God forbid), my husband would be utterly clueless about how to keep our house running. If a pipe burst and began spewing water all over the kitchen, he wouldn’t know that which plumber e call is entirely dependent on the time of day (because one of them is notoriously drunk by 6 p.m. but is both perfectly sober and $45 cheaper than the other on weekdays) or the day of the week (the guy who’s drunk by 6 p.m. might be sober during the day on the weekends but charges three times his normal rate on weekends).

He wouldn’t know which doctor to call if the Big-Eyed Boy got sick since the last time he went to a doctor’s appointment was… um… well, he was there at the birth so I’ll give him credit for that at least.

Since my husband’s rather notorious for spending large sums of money without telling me, particularly if his computer’s involved, I’ve set up a few savings accounts at banks so I can stash emergency cash that he can’t touch. (This, incidentally, is why I also find second to die life insurance attractive since they ensure my children would actually stand to inherit something and are untouchable through life settlements.)

Oh, he knew about the bank accounts when I set them up — he signed the papers after all. But like everything else in our lives that involves finances, cooking, cleaning or social obligations, he dismissed the information as something that is My Job To Remember and promptly forgot all about them. Most times that works in my favor. I will, after all, soon have enough in one of those accounts to get my Wii and that Kindle I’m lusting after, too.

We are, in other words, precisely the kind of people whom professional organizers are thinking about when they suggest creating a notebook training the other spouse to run the household in the event of death, illness or disability.

My newly-single friend is in that very situation, completely at a loss as to how to handle the details of running the formerly marital home that she won in her divorce. She has no idea where her ex stored their financial papers, for instance. Since she was divorced in October, she won’t be filing a joint return for the first time in 5 years but has no idea which deductions are hers or how to prove them. (To be fair, she’s also enough of a scatterbrain that she’s not even sure where she’s placed her own copy of the divorce papers, which would probably tell her these things.) Had she and her husband prepared a notebook while they were married, she’d be much more prepared to start her single life now.

After my friend left, VH and I got to talking. How is it that we’ve managed to stay together, we both wondered, given that I’m a rather hot-tempered kind of woman and, being his third wife, our friends had all placed bets on our divorce before the minister had even finished pronouncing us man and wife.

We think, with the help of a few cocktails, we finally figured it out. We’ve stayed together because, if I wasn’t around to do everything for him, he’d have to handle stuff himself and he’d just screw it up somehow. The fact that we agreed on that explanation probably tells you what’s really kept us together for 10 years now: we have the same sense of humor and both of us are perfectly fine with how truly Venomous I am.

For the record, the only thing more miserable than spending New Year’s Eve and Day throwing up is doing so sober.

Strike that.

There is one thing worse, and that’s the throwing up which comes after one has thrown up every microgram of food, every drop of liquid one has consumed. The kind that leaves you gap-mouthed and drooling into a toilet while your stomach feels like it’s trying to launch itself, bottom first, out of your mouth. The kind that produces that hideous eye-, throat- and nose-burning bile in a shade of yellow which, when seen in nature, is itself nausea-inducing.

Oh, wait. I’m wrong again.

What’s even worse than that is, after enduring 26 or so hours of such vomiting, calling your doctor’s office and reaching her answering service company, only you don’t realize that the person on the other end of the phone isn’t sitting arm’s length away from your doctor where she could, if she understood just how absolutely awful you feel, reach over and drag the doctor to the phone.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I prefer talking to answering services over dealing with voice mail hell any day and particularly on days when I’m sick. Hearing that I need to “Press 1 for English, 2 for Espanol. Or, if this is an emergency, please dial 911″ infuriates me. Like I wouldn’t have called 911 already if it was? That’s a lot easier than remembering my doctor’s phone number, after all.

I prefer reaching a service over a machine, too, since there’s no way of knowing when someone will actually pick up messages. At least talking to a real, live human — whether she’s there at my doctor’s office or not — feels a bit more comforting.

No, what really, truly bothered me about reaching my doctor’s answering service was being asked, in a nicely professional and courteous voice, for my name, number and list of symptoms, all of which I started to provide until another wave of nausea wracked my body and forced me to drop the phone while that poor woman had no choice but to listen to me puke.

To her credit, when I did manage to wipe my mouth and return to the phone she simply said, “Nausea and vomiting. Got it. I hope you feel better soon!” before hanging up the phone. I guarantee this: whatever my doctor is paying them, it’s not enough.

Two minutes later, my doctor rang to let me know she’d already called in a prescription for an anti-emetic. I’m thinking the lady at the service couldn’t have made that happen faster even if she’d been sitting arm’s length from my doctor at the time. Bless her heart. (And I mean that in the non-Southern way.)

From this:
 

To this:
 

My kitchen is still a work in progress. Those awful roosters have been gone for almost a year, remnants from the previous homeowners who somehow convinced themselves that wallpaper appliqués of roosters on the kitchen cupboards would be “nifty”.

We knew when we bought the house three years ago that the roosters had to go. They were, in fact, the first thing I intended to change when we moved in, the second being replacements for the discount window blinds that, like the paint, quickly grew intolerably grimy in a kitchen where someone actually cooks.

That green paint bothered me, too. Oh, I love the color green, but not that particular shade which was really closer to an acid green than an apple, and neither springy nor a color one wants to deal with while, say, suffering a hangover.

Unfortunately, I am a master at putting off work someone else could do tomorrow that I’d otherwise have to do myself today. So I’ve whined and complained about the kitchen’s dingy walls and cupboards, I’ve prattled on about the cheap blinds which had turned more yellow than white and defied all of my efforts to degrease them. I’ve moaned and blitched and otherwise attempted to inspire VH into doing something about our kitchen if only to shut me up.

This weekend, he got the message. Our kitchen is now a sunny shade called “Buttercream” by Behr, and as you can see from the view out my kitchen windows, we’re in need of a dose of sunny and cheery this time of year. Even as I type this he’s painting the kitchen cupboards a nice shade of “Linen” (also by Behr) and finally purging our home of the last traces of that hideous acid green.

The rest of the transformation is, unfortunately, up to me and as I’ve said I’m excellent at putting things off. See, it’s my job to find just the right window blinds or curtains, and I’m having a heck of a time making up my mind. I’m hesitant to get vinyl or wood ones since they tend to attract dust and, particularly in a kitchen, greasy grime that just won’t come off no matter diligent you clean them.

So I got to thinking perhaps curtains are the answer. That way I can simply throw them in the washing machine whenever they start looking dingy or dull. But that just means even more decision-making, which I’m not terribly good at. After all, it took me three solid years to decide on what color to replace that green with, so how can I be expected to pick out window treatments in one short weekend?

I’m thinking I might go with a dash of color, though. Something homey and down-to-earth, something that adds a touch of whimsy and helps bring focus to the room. You know, maybe like a pattern with roosters or something?

Don’t worry, I’m just kidding, folks.