Well well well. It is Friday and my husband has been home for a day after 10 in Chicago....being a sometime single mom is not really as fun as it sounds, but I do, as the song says 'get by with a little help from my friends.' Talking on the telephone is, I think, one of the lost arts. In my time here in purgatory I am not sure that I would have made it this far if not for the telephone and my good friends on the other end of the line. Who says you have to be in the same room to have a drink together? Some of my best times in the past two years have been having drinks with my friends over the phone. Its a simple concept, really, although it takes a bit for some people to get the gist of it. You start with a time, so you can be set up to settle down with your drink and your friend, just like if they were coming over to visit. In my world, this is a little more complicated than it seems. Let me explain.
While my work hours are largely undefined, my employers are in general expecting me to be on point 25/8. Yes, you read that right. Let us back up even a step further and look at my job description. I am chief bottle washer and bottom wiper. As I write this, I realize that the word 'chief' denotes that there is someone else that either works for me or with me, and alas, there is not. I am in charge of entertainment, craft services, work load distribution, dispute mediation and sanitation services. Also among my duties are transportation coordinator, human resource manager and hunter gatherer, to name a few. My employers leaves me largely to my own devices during the day, provided I can perform my duties in a timely fashion. Come 4:00 I am expected to be on point and ready to serve, however. I need to feed the 4 of them, clean to the best of my ambition (which ain't much lately, I can tell you that!) allow for some entertainment time, bathe, book and bed two of them, manage the hygiene of the older two, check homework and usher the older ones into bed. We call this process 'The Night Train' for no reason that any of us can remember, although it certainly does resemble a train once it gets rolling, and it stops for no man. 4:00 comes, and by the time I have completed all of my duties it is 8:00. Now is the time for the making of drinks.
Drinking has long been a hobby of mine, one that I embrace like a lover as often as I can. I am not talking about the rash and indiscriminate consumption of whatever is lying around, although I am not above that. A finely crafted drinky-poo, well placed in you evening, can erase the image of poop smeared on your 18 month old (a result of a clever diaper-removing, poop-flinging monkey) or the depressing sight of clean folded laundry being trampled by the horde in their effort to have 'fun'. I recommend something complicated that wastes at least 10 minutes of your life in the making. My favorites are Cosmos (cliche but yummy), Martinis and my husband's famous life wasting Margaritas, the recipe for which I will share with you. Anyway, I craft my drink, dial the phone, and proceed to pretend that my friend is sitting here with me, right down to uttering the phrase 'let's do a shot'. What do we talk about? Everything and nothing all at once. I could not hope to describe the scope of our conversations, but suffice to say that the hour or so that I share with Renee or Stephanie or Mandy make me able to go to bed smiling and wake up able to face another day of servitude, and often make it possible for me to do so with hope in my heart. Hope that this limbo will end and I will live with my husband once again. So I propose this: A toast to Alexander Graham Bell and to my friends, without whom I would be heavily sedated. My nerd of a husband just told me we should include Meucci and Grey, as they, concurrently with Bell, invented telephones. This is a phenomenon (doo doo doo doo doo) that has happened several times in history, with one guy getting all the credit and a bunch of luckless saps making simultaneous awesome discoveries getting the historical shaft. You learn something new every day.