It's Saturday morning. Like the one morning of this entire year that I could have slept in. Forever. But the fates dictated otherwise.

Here's the thing: My back has given me problems for about 25 years. For the sake of brevity lets just say that for the last two weeks it has been giving me hell - except that fire and brimstone are interchanged with the agony of every combination of stabbing, shooting, throbbing, aching pain imaginable. With every possible movement. So yesterday I went to the chiropractor, who sealed the deal for me and made it so I couldn't breathe, much less walk or drive or think. I texted my BFF Christy on the way home with some unintelligible crying-text-jargon, and she met me at my house with Tiger Balm patches, "grown up" medicine and lots of help. Including relocating a memory foam pad to my living room floor and making it up with all my sheets and pillows so that I would not have to spend another night on the marshmallow bed that I swear we bought JUST to help with my back. Then I had to rush right over to the last High School basketball game at home and pretend to sit through a game and a half, in agony, looking like the undead and smelling like I had recently bathed in a vat of Mentholatum.

Needless to say I went home and crawled into my new floor-bed pretty early, after a few heady arguments with wiener dogs about exactly WHOM the floor-bed was for. I slept like a baby. And I intended to continue to do so for many, many hours - maybe days, even when the 17 year old snuck back in the house during the wee hours, and Truck fell down the last three stairs at about 2 AM, pretended like he meant to and then asked if there was any more room on the floor-bed, and the wiener dogs made their traditional midnight kitchen laps looking for any unattended garbage bags or food morsels, or maybe taking a quick poop under the kitchen table.

I was doing so well, dreaming about killing zombies (I relate this to my state at the basketball game), YouTube videos of mean cats and tiny dogs (I need to google it and see if it exists), and handsome eligible bachelors showing up at basketball games and finding me absolutely irresistible, even in my undead state. And then....

We have this rolling chair at the desk. It's great, when you aren't using it to prop up a broken ankle and some thoughtless teenager leans on it, sans brakes... Or if it is positioned right next to the head of your floor-bed.

It started with the darting tongue of a very excited dachshund who seemed to suddenly remember about the floor-bed and me, and the resultant accessibility of my nose for immediate and aggressive licking. Going from handsome stranger to the insides of my nostrils being evacuated by a tiny tongue in .005 seconds is just weird. And then a certain 11 year old, looking for a safety pin, rolls the rolling chair nearly across my head, just before she turns on the iPod ALLTHEWAYUP and turns on every.single.light.in.the.house. WHY???? SAFETY PIN? NO!!! I couldn't even get any intelligent words out, but the combination of growling, angry, drug-hung-over snorts seemed to scare her AND the wiener dog off momentarily. Or maybe she just realized there were other lights in the house that she had forgotten to turn on.

So here I am. Coffeeless, awake, listening to music that is WAYTOOLOUD for a Saturday morning without coffee. At least it's good music. Now to train the 11 year old to make coffee before she runs over my head with a chair...

My back feels about 52% better, which means the planned trip to Spokane for When's birthday will move forward. Maybe we can find safety pins there. And a nose plug to wear for the duration of the floor-bed era.