Big-A$$ Basket O' Pain

WooHoo! I'm gonna win me a contest. Don't even try, Mabel! Throw in your cryin' towel now. My advisees are a-gonna take the cake. Let me rephrase that, Mabel. THERE IS NO CAKE! I mean I'm winning the prize. Not you. The prize for the do-gooder basket. The door contest, not so much. But listen to this fine kettle of fish. My mom gave me a kick-a$$ basket for our food pantry stuff. Too bad that your group has the women's shelter. That toothpaste and tampons and hair spray ain't gonna look as sweet as our generic vegetables, Mabes. In fact, we could load up our basket-o-plenty with 4-year-old ranch dressing, and we'd still win.

Perhaps I've mentioned that my mother is a saver. I wouldn't go as far as to say she's a 'collector', because her house is not ankle-deep in trash or kitty cats. But she saves stuff that she gets from after-Christmas sales. She gave me a basket the size of the Grand Canyon. OK. That's a bit of an exaggeration. But it's a big-a$$ basket. It's woven wood, I tell you. I have one just like it. I call mine 'The Clean Clothes Basket'. It holds 4 loads of laundry if you mash it just right. Except that my new do-gooder basket still has both handles. One of mine broke off. My basket handle, that is. What do you think I am, some kind of freakish overgrown teapot? Maybe I should only stuff it with 3 loads of laundry.

Oh, but that's not all. My mom threw in some fine trinkets with which to decorate our do-gooder basket. I don't want to brag, but I will. We have a drum on a stick, wooden ornaments, plastic apples, pipe cleaners, ribbon, golden bows, fake presents, and maybe a partridge in a pear tree. Maybe not. I don't want to give away ALL our secrets. But I think we've got the basket licked. Now all we have to do is stock it with food. If I can get each kid to bring something for the basket...we'll have 11 cans of creamed corn. Yum! Some family is going to be very lucky.

I've got a pain in my neck. No, its name is not HH. That pain is a bit lower. This pain in my neck is actually down in my right shoulder blade area. That's 'scapula' to all you anatomy aficionados. It kind of goes around my side, and about halfway through to the front. It's not a constant pain, but intermittent. I've tried taking an aspirin, which worked the first day, and not since. It starts in the morning as I'm driving to school, which tells me it is probably from stress. I know. What does Mrs. Hillbilly Mom have to stress about? She likes her job. But she doesn't like all the rushing that goes with it, what with Christmas preparations and the Pony's therapy and doctor's appointments and the #1 son and his academic team practice and churchy PowerPoint thingy and newspaper staff meetings and Christmas program, and my mom's medical agenda, and oh, did I mention that Mrs. Hillbilly Mom still has work to do? Work that she managed to get done until now by staying after school every day until 5:00. And now that those two extra hours are taken up with everyone else's appointments, the work doesn't get done. Which is perhaps why Mrs. HM was up at 4:00 a.m. washing the dishes. In case you haven't heard: she has no dishwasher.

I tried all manner of far-fetched ideas to explain the pain. Stress, sleeping wrong, leaning sideways when sitting at my Delly, heart attack, leaning on the door while driving, the way I sit in the recliner to watch TV, scrunching up to avoid HH's arm which is always on my side of the bed, lifting things to the back seat of the LSUV to the Pony, etc. Then tonight, my mother had the most scathingly brilliant idea. "Could it be from balancing the back door of your LSUV on your head?" BINGO! That's the one ailment I hadn't entertained. By cracky, I think she's onto something! That's about when this pain started.

That is typical of my thinking. I can't see the forest for the trees. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've been heard to utter, "What forest? Maybe if someone would get all these confounded trees out of my way, I could see a forest!" Indeed.

In case anybody (Mabel) looked for this work of art earlier in the evening...my Delly had issues again. I think he has an alien in his belly. An alien. In Delly's belly. Anyhoo, it even stumped my little techno dude. Then he suddenly shouted, "I don't know what you tried, but a simple restart did it." Hmpf! I tried a restart first. Then a system restore. Then I poked at keys randomly. Nothing worked. Delly refused to recognize the keyboard. Never mind that the boy also had the mouse on strike after he commenced to fiddlin'. But now he thinks he fixed it. He's so bright. I think I'll call him 'son'.