My husband and the kids are out of the house and I can't think of a damn thing to do with myself. I suppose it doesn't help matters that my mom is over here trying to escape her stress. Hah! If she only knew.

I tried to occupy myself with on-line activities, all of which lead me to Facebook, which has become the bane of my existence. If I see one more picture of an old friend whooping it up in exotic locations, all tan and spectacular, still the same size they were in 1986 - or worse - so JCrew fabulous in professional portraits with their mogul husbands and neat little come-with-the-frame families I'm going to be in a permanent state of F&*K me. I know I'm not supposed to be swearing now, because that was my number one resolution for this year but I'll be GD'd if all my interactions with my life so far this year have not been the equivalent of curse-inducing medications injected directly into the bloodstream in high enough doses that the flaming pope might have a hard time keeping the F-bomb under his pointy little parade hat.


So I spent a few minutes sorting out the pieces of a puzzle I've been meaning to do. That was fine for the first few minutes. Until I noticed (not for the first time) the pathetic state of my dining room table. This is a table, which as part of a set, cost my husband and I $4000 - a hefty sum when we bought it and even heftier now that we have no income-producing jobs. The table is made of fine cherry wood and stained in a very intricate pattern unique to the artisan who did the work (or that's the crap the salesperson fed us when we were shopping and we ate it up yummy yummy). The table was the site of our first formal Thanksgiving and has been the altar at which many a dinnertime prayer has been offered since.


The thing is, the table is now irrevocably etched with the permanent remains of those dinners, and the countless other activities that have taken place at the table in between each meal, not the least of which have included:


laundry folding
things that happen with glue
homework
things that happen with hot glue guns
artwork
things that happen with an iron
card writing
things that happen when your bathroom upstairs falls into the dining room downstairs
finger painting
things that happen when you don't tarp your furnishings while you paint the room
and other things.


At this point, if you were going to roller skate on the table, and I'm not ruling it out given the list above, you'd definitely need the knee pads because, like the Chicago streets after a particularly lavish display of mother nature's bitchiness expressed in ice and snow, you'd definitely fall into at least one or two potholes.


So I stopped working on the puzzle because it was not having the de-stressing effect I was hoping for.


I did some cooking earlier today, including a slow-bake of a chicken and asparagus cassarole. I was kind of hoping that would turn into a one-pot dinner type thing so I wouldn't have to cook again later. Unfortunately, if you leave creamy, cheesy, garlicky stuff around my mother and me at 3 p.m., the chances of that same item being around at 5:30 p.m. when dinnertime arrives are not so good. Also, the baking was not my most brilliant stroke, because like seemingly everything I use in the kitchen, the baking dish is not going to get clean in the dishwasher. And I've tried that thing where you just pretend that the dishwasher missed a spot so you leave an item in there one more time. And then again. And then do the heavy wash. And then throw it out because you've systematically and over a series of days affixed the once just sticky item permanently to the sides of whatever the article was in the first place. So I'm going to have to wash the baking dish by hand. And that pisses me off. So I'm not relaxing after dinner. Nor am I relaxing now in anticipation of being pissed after dinner.

I can't wait for my husband and kids to get home so I can be stressed with a sense of purpose. Relaxing is so annoying.