Things You Don't Want

Something you don’t want to have happen to you three days before you leave for a cruise:

To be in charge of the fun, exciting, smiley-face rainbow concession stand for PTO Skate Night, which means you will spend an hour moving heavy boxes of soda and candy from the storage room at the school to your car. You will be sweating like a pig from the manual labor and then you will drop one of the boxes on your ankle because the cardboard was cheap and flimsy and I swear you will think you have broken whatever that top part of your ankle is called and you will seriously consider renting a wheelchair for the cruise because my God how much do those Airheads weigh anyway and did the school kids in the cafeteria hear me cussing????


Something you don’t want to have happen to you two days before you leave for a cruise:

To realize one of the bags of ice that you had in the back of your van for the not-as-much-fun-now Skate Night Fundraiser was forgotten, and melted, and now the back of your van smells like an animal died and rotted in it. And not a teeny tiny sweet-smelling animal, either, like a cute little chipmunk or bunny rabbit. I’m talking big, stinky, gut-rot odor like you would get from a dead yak. And you’ll have to run all your last-minute errands with that stench filling your nostrils and you will wonder if there is enough Febreze on the entire planet to help.


Something you don’t want to have happen to you the day before you leave for a cruise:

To realize that when you were unloading (see above) bags of ice out of your deep freeze in the garage for the )#($*#(%&#)* Skate Night, that you accidentally left the freezer door cracked, and all your meat thawed and is now dripping down the inside of the deep freeze. And you will beg your husband to brown all the hamburger meat, and boil all the chicken, and separate the meat out and put it in freezer baggies so you can re-freeze all of it, because my GOD you are leaving in less than eight hours and you haven’t even finished the laundry, let alone started packing, and I swear if you have to stand here for two hours cooking all the meat you will have a nervous breakdown and never be ready for your 5 am flight tomorrow…..whimper.


Something you don’t want to have happen to you on your first day of vacation:

To discover that the hotel you are staying at, while very nice and pretty and happy, apparently can’t handle the electrical demand of dual-hairdryers, because while you are blow-drying your hair in the bedroom, and then your mother turns on *her* blow dryer in the bathroom, you will blow the fuse in the room and every outlet except ONE will be non-working, so you will then flat-iron your hair while sitting on the mini-bar because good grief, birds will try to nest in it otherwise.

Something you don’t want to have happen to you on your second day of the cruise:

To be sitting in the beautiful atrium on the ship, enjoying Wi-Fi internet, and the breathtaking scenery, and listening to the strains of the wonderful string quartet before dinner, only for the musicians to break into a haunting rendition of the theme to Titanic.

Seriously?????

That doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

PS. Grandma J, are you here????

PPS. Going on a float plane in Ketchikan with my mom today ..... if that doesn't promote mother-daughter bonding, I don't know what will!!!