I went down to Mrs. B's house to do my first housecleaning job. I had all my supplies and equipment fairly effeciently packed, had on my new cheap tennis shoes from Wal-Mart. I think if you are a cleaning lady you have to have cheap shoes from Wal-Mart: it's like a law or something. I hate Wal-Mart, but I did have a gift card in my wallet that had $4.00 on it and the shoes were $3.00 so I bought those and some garbage bags. I swear, my life is so glamorous sometimes I don't know how I stand it.

The job took longer than I expected for a number of reasons. Mrs. B. is a really nice person, but her blood sugar is not okay. She kept breaking out in these sweats and asking me for a cool washcloth, which, naturally, I brought her, but I was so concerned about her I kept checking on her every 2 seconds . For somebody who can't stand up for longer than 5 minutes at a time, her house was in remarkabley good shape - there are people in perfect health whose home is not so well kept as hers was....

Around lunch time I was going to take a break and go up to the convenience store for a soda, but Mrs. B. offered me one out of the fridge. When I am doing heavy physical work like that I can't really eat lunch - I was like that at the tile shop too. However, I did heat up her meals-on-wheels for her and make her coffee, etc.

She says the meals-on-wheels are "all right", but this one looked appalling. It was turkey with something that might very loosely be termed gravy- it was so runny it was hard to tell, collard greens, and something brown. I tell you that if I had a gun to my head I could not identify that substance. God bless her, she ate every bit of it without complaining, but I hope I never have to eat such stuff day in and day out. Never mind meals-on-wheels, this stuff looked like meals that might still be moving!

"Are you sure you don't want me to dig around in the cupboard and find some kind of seasoning for that?" I asked.

"It's all right. It's not that bad. It's bland, but it's okay. They're not allowed to put hardly any seasoning or salt in them, you know. Hypertension. Ulcers. The things people have. Yesterday it was Mexican. That was really bad. I cut the meat up and gave it to the dogs."

Mexican meals-on-wheels without any seasoning: gives new meaning to the phrase "it's hell getting old." !

Meanwhile Dad, aka "the marketing guru", put my ad in the County Times again, this time with a little blurb that says "Makes a great Mother's Day Gift!"

The phone rang once while I was at Mrs. B's but it was only my poor brother, who is in the midst of moving to PA, and is consequently under so much stress that the whole family is just waiting for his head to explode. His particular stress had to do with getting a weed whacker. There are now, it appears, about a million different kinds to chose from with different angles of the handle etc. And you can't exactly try them out in the Home Depot....though, from the way the plants look a the one up the street, it looks like somebody did demo one in the garden department.

My list of things to do for tomorrow is: go to the chiropracter, go to the bank, go to the insurance agency, go to the store, call my Avon D.M to find out how to place the orders I have taken, clean out the dog's ears (this is more time consuming than you might think. You have no idea!) clean out the car, pay my bills, organize my Avon stuff into files, distribute flyers and clean the upstairs bedrooms.

I have a question. Why am I busier now than I was when I had a full time job?