Spoiled? I'm Not Spoiled. I Simply Want Everything Exactly As I Want It Right Away!

Some days are easier than others. My guess is you know that from personal experience.

April 50th has not yet arrived, and what is an even more ominous sign (or lack thereof), I exchanged emails with my agent this morning, and she didn't mention how my royalty check was on its merry way. Usually when I email her and there's a check on its way, she informs me as a distraction (a technique I know well with Scooter, who can sometimes be convinced not to bite me if I toss one of his toys a safe distance from my ankle). I think however, if I read between the lines correctly, she has noticed I sent her The Offering. I wouldn't want to swear to it though.

It is a sad commentary on my everyday life that I'm not even all that upset about the slow motion of my career. Underlying everything is my concern about my mother and her move back to her apartment. It's scheduled for Thursday, and my guess is I'll feel better once it's done, but it's still worrysome. If my brother and I hadn't felt she needed more help, we never would have arranged for the enriched housing room.

Hmm... Either spellcheck isn't working, or it really is spelt "worrysome." I thought it was worrisome.

Google says it's worrisome. I am not surprised.

Back to complaining (and not even complaining about spellcheck not working). Yesterday morning my smoke detector started chirping. Marci and I had lunch today with my mother, and it turns out Marci can do a fabulous imitation of a chirping smoke detector. For those of you who've never heard one (or heard Marci's imitation), it's like a castrati bird on steroids.

Double hmm. After four years of high school Latin, I have my doubts that castrati is a singular. Castratus? Castratum? Or is the word Italian, which I don't know one bit of. Triple hmm.

Anyway, I couldn't get the smoke detector to stop its high pitched song of love, so after several hours (some of which, I grant you, I wasn't home for), I disembowled it. This is trickier than it might seem because my apartment has very high ceilings and I'm not getting any taller. Eventually I pulled two out of three smoke detectors off the ceiling, and yet it still kept chirping. Finally I hid them in my outside storage closet, but this morning when I pulled them out so they could be fixed and put back in place (the advantage of apartment living), one of them continued to chirp. It was very Twilight Zone.

My friend Pat, who heard the chirping even though she lives 3000 miles away (the telephone is really an astonishing invention) suggested attacking the smoke detectors with a broom handle (her system). Frankly, if I'd had a baseball bat handy, that's what I would have used. Instead I used my big ladder and my bare hands and the outside storage closet.

I came back from lunch to find the smoke detectors in place and fabulously silent, only to have aspects of my cable stop working. I lost MLB Extra Innings (which couldn't happen at a worse time, since baseball is a huge stress reducer for me, not to mention that this is not the best moment for a New York Yankees fan to be watching New York Yankees games) and a variety (like almost all of them) of the high def stations I get on my fancy high def TV.

Yes, I still get a whole lot of TV stations. And if the Mets don't get rained out, I can watch the Mets and the MLB Network is showing the Phillies/Cards game, which is what I'd be watching anyway, although it's way prettier in high def. I know all that.

The cable repairperson will come Friday between 11-2. And I'm supposed to be grateful I don't have to wait until next week.

Then there's the weather. Have I mentioned the weather? The endless endless endless dreary rainy days? The only nice weather the northeast has had was when I was in Arizona (where the weather was lovely, but I was mostly in an airplane flying there and back). I read the 10 day weather forecast which said it's going to rain until Sunday when suddenly it's going to be sunny and 85 degrees for the next week, which means we're skipping spring altogether and going from March to July. Which, now that I think about it, may well mean April 50th will never arrive.

Now here's the thing (see, wait long enough, and the thing eventually arrives). I wrote Life As We Knew It.* I gleefully deprived my characters of food, water, heat, sunlight, clean air, televison, the internet, friends, family, safety, electricity, transportation, and probably lots of other stuff. I killed off entire countries (I still feel a little guilty about that). Throw in the characters from The Dead And The Gone* and This World We Live In*, and we're talking about a lot of pain and suffering and loss and pretty much everything except locusts and the death of the firstborns.

I remind myself of my characters' suffering whenever lunch is a little late or I can't get my baseball games or it drizzles outside, and you know what? I don't care. I still feel sorry for myself.

Then again, none of my characters ever had to put up with a chirping smoke detector, so what do they know of true suffering!

*Apparently not only is spellcheck dead, but I'm no longer allowed to italicize.

ETA to announce italics have returned, my cable has miraculously healed itself, MLB Extra Innings is back, and all the games are rained out, except, of course, for the Yankees.

I am going to eat supper and ponder all this irony until April 50th rolls around.

ETA Number Deux: It's castrato (and it is Italian).