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There is a nail behind the door to the upstairs that usually holds the flyswatter and my back scratcher. (If you don’t have a back scratcher, get one.) This summer that nail was reassigned to hold up the Record Of Awesomeness.

Actually, it was the Record of Funny (which in my book is the same the thing). We decided that a point would be awarded when somebody said the absolute funniest thing that could be said in a given situation.

We were pretty good at keeping the record straight for the first few, but then I just wound up giving myself a whole bunch, trusting that I would be funny sometime in the future.

Well, Brad is gone,so there was no reason to keep my ‘winning’ record up. (They knew where the marker was.) Now that nail is helping to solve a completely different problem.

Lloyd really likes Special K Red Berries but he only eats it once in a blue moon, so I wind up finishing the box. Without fail then next day he wants some cereal.

Today, we bought two boxes. One for the cereal cupboard, and one for the nail.

Um, I fell asleep at 7:30 last night in front of the t.v. and never wrote a post.

So, to make up for my transgression, tell us what you ate for breakfast. I’m having bacon and eggs – a Saturday staple. You?

So I was getting some ice from the freezer and Lloyd was headed down to the basement. A wicked, mean ice cube fell down and smashed my innocent toe.

Me: “Aaaarrrrggggllllle!”

Lloyd (from the stairs): “You ok?”

Me: “Gggggggaaarrmmm…”

Lloyd (faintly, because he is now all the way in the basement, not rushing to my aid): “There, there.”

Brad and Mark brought up Little House on the Prairie and my deep love of it for the rest of my life as a child.

Oh, how I loved that show! And the books! And the books about the show! I loved everything about it – the clothes, the lanterns, the churning of butter and such. (Have you read Farmer Boy? You will never read better descriptions of food. ever.) I blame Garth Williams and his crazy addictive drawings. The drawings, words (and the t.v. show) whisked me away to a rich, rich inner world of imagination.

During my kindergarten/first grade years I had a long dress with flowers and lace ribbons that I wanted to wear every moment of every day, and also as a nightgown. Where is that dress? I should have it made into a pillow.

I have a hazy memory of going to some magical place with my family one summer (Silver Dollar City?) and buying a bonnet. Are you hearing me, people? A genuine bonnet! I also believe that this is where one of my two lanterns was purchased. Y’know, I don’t know what the deal was with my parents, but I was never allowed to put fuel in those. I think they started my pyromania by not allowing me to set things on fire as a child. That makes sense, right?

Oh, to be a child again and long to live in a wood cabin – the mind of youth blissfully unaware that there is no way that cabin is air-conditioned. *sigh*

For the past week or so we’ve been in the process of ‘transitioning dishwashers’. That fancy talkin’ means we bought a new dishwasher, tore the old one out, and have left the new dishwasher sitting in the middle of the kitchen until we get around to installing it.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing dishes by hand. This is a bit of a novelty since I actually have a cool dish drainer from IKEA that I hardly ever get to use. Usually it hangs on a nail in the basement, but this week it has been called to duty.

Put an ugly stained cookie sheet underneath the drainer to catch water and we are good to go. (My mom has one of those absorb-y mats and loves it.)

We could live like this for weeks, and probably will.

At the sweaty auction on Saturday they, of course, mostly had computer things, but I think some pharmacy place got rid of things because there was a whole area of drug-related items like cases and cases of the kinds of pill boxes they fill ahead of time for hospitals.

There was really only had one table I was interested in. It had two cases of big liter-sized glass bottles that weren’t round, but bowed on the front and flat on the back, like a glass mouthwash bottle or something. There were also had a couple of boxes of similarly-shaped two-ounce bottles. I wanted them, but didn’t need them, so I just went to visit them often.

On one visit, a man with a man trailing closely behind him approached me. The first man, who will be referred to hereafter as Not the Creepy Man, asked me what the bottles could be used for. I started to wax philosophically about how you could make flavored vodkas or limoncello in the large bottles, or homemade vanilla extract in the little bottles. He lit up at that and said that you could make your own labels and give them as gifts. At this point the other man, hereafter referred to as Creepy Man, made a slightly off-color joke. (I have blanked it from my memory.) I laughed a small, polite laugh, then turned back to NCM to talk bottles. Then Creepy Man handed me a card, which I did not take. It said something to the effect of, “If you want to have sex, redeem this card. If you don’t want to, tear it up.” I smiled and said weakly, “uh…” He handed it to NCM (who I am guessing at this point that they are friends?) and said, “Try it! You can’t rip it up! It’s plastic.”

NCM and I are almost done with our bottle talk, and Creepy Man shows me a three-dollar bill that has a picture of Hilary Clinton on it. I use my preschool teacher voice (the same one I use when acknowledging that someone has just drawn a two-inch line and hands it to me to take home), “You have a lot of things in your wallet, don’t you?” and make my exit.

So here’s my quandary: I didn’t want to be rude, and honestly, I don’t think I could really do this, but wouldn’t the better thing in that situation would have been to tell him, “I can see that you are trying to have a conversation with me, but the things you are showing me are skeeving me out. This is not normal behavior. That card is creepy. Throw it away.”

I regret that first little laugh. He didn’t seem like a psycho, he seemed like a guy who perhaps thought that I would find this funny – which makes me want to re-evaluate the vibes I’m giving off. Putting the best construction on everything, I would say that he just had Bad People Skills.

Did I do him a disservice or not? Was it better to be polite or would it have been better to be honest?