Sleeping Surging Foot Sweat

About that list from yesterday...I had good intentions. Really. I even went to bed three hours early. Yep. 11:00 instead of 2:00. Did I awake early, ready to tackly some projects on my list? NO! I still arose at the late, late hour of 8:00 a.m., and I still watched two ERs on TBS. I really meant to do something worthwhile, but the day got away from me.

Oh, and this afternoon, we had another one of those freakish power surges. We were having a bit of a thunderstorm at the time. I went out the basement door just to smell the rain. It was still hot as The Devil's Playground out there, and as I was leaning my arms on a concrete retaining wall, looking up at a wasp nest the size of a McDonald's hamburger, there was a jagged flash of lightning to the northeast, which is really quite freaky, coming from that direction, and a clap of thunder indicating that the lightning was directly overhead, what with the one-thousand-one rule in effect. #1 son came out to annoy me, and we watched the wind pick up. The rain came down at more of a slant then. Funny thing, even when there is no wind, our rain falls at an angle. Not a 90 degree angle, as one might expect, at least one who understands Euclidean geometry. But no. Our rain falls from west to east, at about 85 degrees, if you are gonna run your imaginary protactor along the ground and measure up to the sky. Maybe we are falling off the edge of the Earth.

The power shut down my Crashy, of course. But Crashy always restores himself like a champ, after running that scandisk thingy proclaiming improper shutdown. The other two computers, Desky and Schooly, as well as Lappy, were not affected. Poor, poor Gamey, still in his state of de-animation, did not even know there was a surge. Perhaps that is for the best.

And now here is something freakish which you may not want to know. It's not for the squeamish. Look away, look away, for the love of Gummi Mary, look away if you do not like feet. Last chance now. Skip three paragraphs if you are starting to feel all hot-cold sweaty and nauseous.

The #1 son has always had sweaty palms. I used to think it was just from holding his GameBoy all the time. No. He has sweaty, clammy hands most of the time. I did not know that it applied to his feet as well. Even though I don't like feet, I will sometimes pat his gigantic man-hooves in the morning. He comes to sit in the old recliner while I am viewing ER. By 'sit', I mean lie sideways like a gargantuan overgrown child who does not understand that adult-size people do not hang their head over one arm of the chair, and their knees over the other arm. His feet reach all the way to MY recliner, and he puts them on my arm just to be a pest. Go figure! So I sometimes pat or squeeze his feet, which annoys HIM, and he removes them from my personal space. It is easier than arguing if I tell him to move them. And I don't miss any ER dialogue. We're near the end of season 3 right now: Mark Green has not yet acquired his tumor (and by that, I mean his brain tumor, not his red-headed-surgeon-wife tumor).

I don't know if he (my boy, not Mark Green, because I don't presume to know anything about Mark Green's feet; it was bad enough after he got that tumor--the redheaded-surgeon-wife tumor, not the brain tumor--that I had to see him scratching his private area while lecturing some new med students, seeing as how the new tumor he was sleeping with was not acquainted with Mr. Poison Ivy, having been deprived of it in her native England) has the cool, calm, collected feet early on because he has just awoken, or what. Perhaps the millions of sweat gland workers have not yet clocked in, but are still straggling to the plant, having wrapped their bologna sandwiches on Wonder bread with mustard in some waxed paper, put some nacho cheese Doritos in a baggie, and dropped an apple and banana into their black metal lunchboxes, alongside the thermos full of coffee, black.

But getting back to the story of my boy's sweaty feet...this morning, I waited about an hour after he got up, and went to his room to talk to him. He was laying IN the floor, watching TV on two TVs at once (that's another story) and pecking away at Lappy. I stepped on his foot to get his attention. YEEEWWWW! It was cold, wet, and clammy. I recoiled. He laughed. He said, "Listen to this, Mom. Yesterday, when I was working on Gamey, I was sitting on #2's computer chair like I sit on the stool at the cutting block when I eat lunch." (That means he was sitting on one foot, with the other on the chair, his knee sticking up in the region of his chin. Because he is a squatter with no proper seating etiquette.) "When I got done calling the Compaq people, I lifted up that foot, and there was a footprint there on the chair. Then I pulled my big toe away from that one next to it, and a string of sweat stretched out. Like saliva between your lips. And when it quit stretching, it dripped on the floor, like a raindrop. Isn't that gross?"

OK. I think that will do. I'm feeling a bit queasy myself.