When I Take Over My World: Is Something Burning?

That is probably not the question that Randy wanted to ask me this morning.

And he probably didn't want to hear me say, "Why, yes, Honey, something is burning."

I have a penchant for office supplies. I share this penchant with my friend, Jon. I love sticky notes, paper and notebooks and my personal favorite, pens. The more pens, the better. The more colors, the better. Gel pens, ink pens, highlighters. I love 'em.

In another life, I used to carry a ziploc bag of about 25 different pens in my bag for work. Sometimes, the only highlight to my day was reaching into my bag of pens with my eyes closed to randomly pick out the pen to use that day. And since that was early in my morning, you can imagine how the rest of the day went.

And in elementary school, I may have been the one who, ahem, borrowed and never returned pens from the teacher's desk.

I usually buy pens in a set of 5 or 6 of the same kind, but in different colors. And I try to use them all evenly so they run out of ink at the same time. One time I had lost a purple pen from a set. I was sad. Then one day I found it. I was happy.

I had also taught myself how to use the 'picture in picture' feature on our TV that day, so it was a real good day.

Of course, there is no way at all, in my lifetime, that I can use up all the pens that I have. And since I am the age I am, my lifetime is more than half over, I've got a lot of writing left to do. Though I no longer take the pens from hotel rooms and it has been a couple of years since I have bought a pack o'pens, I still gaze lovingly at them in the store.

But this morning, I found that two pens were dry. Now, these pens have got to be pushing six years old. That's way past menopausal in pen years. They have a right to be dried up. But since they are like members of my family to me, I can't part with them. So I attempted to resurrect them using a lit match to the tip trick. The trouble is, the ceiling fan in my craft room was on medium and it blew out the match. Being too lazy to turn off the fan and too impatient to wait for the fan to stop, I took my matches and one of the pens into the computer room where Randy was on his second Mountain Dew. He barely even noticed that I was in the room with him, let alone lighting matches.

I almost got one pen going, then had to walk all the way back to the craft room to get the other one. All this walking (5 steps) was getting ridiculous, so I figured that just turning off the fan in the craft room would be a lot less strenuous on my body. After lighting a half dozen matches, Randy finally woke up to something burning. Hence the "is something burning?" question.

Now at least I know how to really wake him up in the morning.

"Wakey wakey, the house is on fire. Kidding. I just wanted you to get up."