My family enjoys playing games of all types. Of course, games like Candy Land went away when I grew up, came back when we had a child, and left again. But games like Trouble (and many versions of it), word games, and Risk have been in our cupboard for many years.  I was actually grateful when we got a little tired of Monopoly, but some games have endured for my entire life. Clue is one of those, although these days, I’m playing a slightly different version of Clue. I call it Senior Clue.

               Around the first of August last year, I had a tiny little biking accident. The accident was completely my fault. We were on vacation and on our last day, we had taken bikes from our bed and breakfast to ride around the island. Since we were on vacation, the only footwear I had packed were flip-flops. I didn’t think this was a big deal, though clearly it wasn’t the safest choice I could have made.

As it turned out, it was really dumb. My flip-flip got caught on the pedal and rather than crash into some poor person’s fence, I crashed into their concrete steps. This resulted in two bones in my foot breaking. It was a pitiful end to a great vacation.  The rest of that month I spent wearing one of those large, clompy boots to insure my foot would heal well. I did get pretty good at getting around in it, especially since I had a smaller, lighter boot in which I could drive.

               I followed all the doctor’s orders and by early September, I was able to wear real shoes. The doctor, however, said absolutely no flip-flops or bare feet, even around the house. Fortunately, I found a pair of lightweight, summer shoes that were comfortable and gave me support. They are also hideous, but at a certain age we prefer function over style.

               So for a couple of weeks, my body adjusted to not wearing the heavy boot and to walking normally. I even began to go up and down stairs just like a youngster. Well, like I had in July, anyway. I was carrying some laundry upstairs by hooking the hangers between my thumb and forefinger and raising them high enough so that they didn’t drag on the ground. By the time I reached the top of the stairs, I was in agony. I couldn’t bend my thumb at all, and pain shot through my entire hand when I tried to use it. It appears that carrying three shirts on hangers upstairs sprained some muscle or tendon in my finger/thumb area. A couple of nights with ibuprofen and ice pads and I could move it again, but any serious stretching in that area causes me twinges of pain, even now.

Then one night a few weeks later, I was working a jigsaw puzzle.  After about an hour, I stood up. Pain shot through my knee and I limped to the kitchen to complain to Matt about this new development.

               I knew from an injury I had in 2011 that you can fall on your knee and the cartilage could take weeks to break down. I feared this is what had happened. Not wanting a repeat of that horrible experience, I began popping glucosamine like M&Ms and elevated my knee, placing an ice pack on it.

               It seemed to get a little better, but then that night in bed, I raised my knee up under the covers and a rocket of pain launched from my knee up to my hip. My dear husband (who is very knowledgeable about muscles) calmly said, “Oh, you’ve strained your quadriceps.”

               Seriously? I strained a major muscle in my leg by…standing up?  This is ridiculous! But, it turns out, he was absolutely correct. With some muscle cream and a heating pad, I got that bad muscle back in shape in two days.

               I didn’t even know what a quadriceps was until this happened, so I guess you actually do learn something new every day. I totally understand that riding a bike in flip-flops is just asking for an injury. I was disappointed that carrying hangers over my thumb could cause an injury. And I am totally dismayed to discover that merely standing up can cause an injury. And there you have it – that’s Senior Clue.

               It’s not about who killed Colonel Mustard in what room with which weapon. It’s all about what body part will malfunction next, when, and by doing what.

Do you play this game, too?

Less than a year ago, we purchased new carpeting for our family room and hall. We hadn’t replaced the original carpeting in at least 15 years, and it had been tracked on by us, our child, his friends (most of whom were burly high school football players), a variety of family members, and many pets. It was in sad shape.

            So I was thrilled that, now that our son was an adult and had moved out, we could get new carpeting for the most-used room in our house. The hallway runs parallel to the family room and goes to the mudroom. On the other side of the hallway, also parallel, is our kitchen. It is sort of a “great” room, with a wide entrance from the kitchen, through the hall and into the family room, but the hall itself is about 3 feet wide and 15 feet long.

            Less than a year. Which is why I was so mad at myself in March when I took a bag of kitchen trash to the back door to put in out in the trashcan. I walked through the kitchen and down the hall and when I got to the back door, I noticed something dripping onto my foot. Some kind of nasty, awful, thick grease was leaking out of my “leakproof” kitchen trash bag!  It had drizzled all through the kitchen (which thankfully has a ceramic and easily cleaned floor) and all through the hallway in a lazy “S” pattern. Grease.

            My mom would have said, “I just can’t have nice things.” And I had done this myself. I raced the bag to the trash can, cleaned up the mudroom (linoleum) and kitchen floors, and grabbed the spray bottle of stain remover and a large rag. It’s a name-brand, supposedly effective stain remover and I squirted and scrubbed and squirted and scrubbed all the way down the path of that grease in the hall.

            The stain laughed. I tried another brand of stain remover, one guaranteed to remove any and all stains. Scrubbing and scrubbing left me a small patch at the very beginning of the stain that appeared to be gone.

            It was back the next day.

            We borrowed a carpet cleaner from friends and cleaned the entire area, even the family room. The carpet looked brand new. I went over the stained portion about seven times and the stain was gone!  It looked wonderful.

            It was back the next day, chortling at me with malicious glee.

            Meanwhile, the pandemic had hit hard and I was staying at home with that evil stain, running the length of my hall and mocking me every day.

            Then, the solution appeared – as if by magic – on my Amazon page. I was searching for vacuum cleaner filter replacements, when a “recommendation” came up for a little throw rug. Aha!  Inspiration struck.

            Just days later, I received my 2’ 7” wide, 12’ long carpet runner. It fits nicely in the hall, as though we had planned it that way from the beginning. And it’s just wide enough to cover the wandering stain fully.

            Who’s laughing now, greasepot?

               There was a time in my life when I was an expert at multi-tasking. I could read a book while watching television and keep both stories straight!  I could work a jigsaw puzzle, cook dinner, and carry on a conversation that made sense – all at the same time.

               Sadly, I fear those days are waning. In fact, I don’t so much multi-task now, as I multi-risk. If I try to do two things at once, it is very likely that both are at risk for being completely messed up. It’s dangerous to add a third task, for certain. I know this because of a day I had last week.

               I was cooking dinner while doing the laundry. That seems like a normal “dual-task” situation, and a situation I’ve completed successfully thousands of times.  I felt like everything was proceeding fairly normally. Then I received a text from our niece, asking me if I had received a letter from an agency at which she had used me as a reference. Just as I was answering her, I got a second text. This one was from a friend, asking if we were free on Wednesday evening. Now, I know that when you read a new text, you have to close it out before you go back to the any other text. But while I know that, I was trying to pull clothes out of the dryer and also listen for the timer on the microwave.

               So I quickly texted that I had, indeed been asked for a reference and had already submitted it. Then, I opened the other text and responded that, due to the pandemic, our schedule was generally pretty clear. What did she have in mind?

               While I was removing the item from the microwave, my phone dinged twice with two more texts. My niece wanted to know what our open schedule had to do with her reference and what she had in mind was getting a job. My friend wanted to know who had been asking about her.

               Clearly, I had responded to the wrong people with the right information. Or was it the right people with the wrong information? While I was straightening out this mess of my own making, the pan on the stove bubbled over.  I dropped the phone on the counter and picked up the pan very quickly. In my haste, I knocked a baggie holding some ingredients for dinner onto the stove top. I set down the pan as fast as I could and scooped the baggie off the stove. Or what was left of the baggie. Most of the plastic had adhered to the stove top.

               I researched on the internet and found that rubbing alcohol will remove this disaster. I checked my cabinet and we had this item, but the bottle had about a teaspoon left in it. I tore off my flannel shirt and grabbed a sweater from the laundry room. Pulling it over my head, and snagging a mask from the desk, I dashed to the car and went to the store to get more rubbing alcohol.

                The sweater had just been delivered the day before from my trusty on-line delivery service. It was in the laundry room so that I could remove the tags and wash it. I remembered that – only when I found those tags all over me while standing in the checkout line. 

Meanwhile, all my delicate shirts were undoubtedly crumpled in the bottom of the dryer, developing permanent wrinkles that would require either ironing or another spin with a wet towel through the dryer.

               Multi-risking is my new skill, apparently.

Some errors we make ourselves, while some are thrust upon us. For example, back in my youth, I had a freak accident while driving. I had the accident – but it was not my fault. It happened like this:

               I was driving down a two-lane highway in the evening, alongside the beautiful Ohio River. It was dark, but my headlights illuminated the roadway ahead of me quite nicely. Way in front of me I could just make out the outline of a large dump truck. Behind me, at a nice distance, was a pair of headlights. The moon was shining on the river, and my boyfriend (at the time) was in the back seat, while my mom was in the front passenger seat.

               My headlights suddenly caught a rolling object in the cross hairs. It was rolling fast and coming right down the middle of my lane. The car that had been at a distance behind me was just passing me. The road to my right had a sharp incline down to the river. I had three choices – sideswipe the car next to me at 50 mph, steer into the river, or hit the object head on.

               In the second I had to decide, the object – which turned out to be a tire – hit me.  Well, it hit the car, right in the middle of the grill, bounced up and hit the windshield, and then flew over the top of the car. I began to slow down, of course, and in my rearview mirror I saw the tire make a bounce, and continue rolling down the road.

               The car next to us pulled over, right in front of me. Thankfully, no one was seriously injured, although I did get a black eye from hitting the steering wheel upon impact.

               This accident was was so freakish that it was almost comedic. It turned out the dump truck was carrying a load of tires and thankfully the one that fell off and rolled had no hub cab or metal in it!

               Some errors of a freakish nature are those we make ourselves. Right before Easter this year, I was creating a basket for our adult son. This tradition is one that I enjoy, and since I now pack the basket with interesting things to cook and money/gift cards instead of toys and candy, I think he likes it, too. The pandemic caused me to get most of the items via the internet this year, but I wanted to tuck some little sweet item in the basket (which nowadays is a bag). Anyway, I was getting some meat at the butcher shop and spotted some cool looking cookies at the checkout. A bunny and a carrot cookies went into the bag.

               It was several days later when my son called me to say that the cookies seemed to be granola rather than actual cookies. I asked him to read me the label and it turned out they were neither cookies, nor granola. They were dog treats!  Ack!  It pays to read the labels closely!

               Then there are those events caused by nature, God, or just dumb bad luck. Last week, I was sitting on our patio, enjoying a glass of wine, when something plopped on my head. It was a tree frog!  The nearest tree was many feet away, and the frog had to jump up and under the umbrella to achieve this scary feat.

               When my screaming subsided, my husband rescued the frog and placed him back out by the tree. This is small comfort to me, because I believe the frog now knows how to leap onto my head. But, like the rolling tire, at least this freak accident was not my fault!