You Make Up a Title, I'm Over It

First, a Question:
Why is Mary-Kashley Olsen famous?

Next, a Quote:
I swooped Bird up on the playground yesterday at daycare and she yanked the neck of my shirt open, looked in, and said:

"Hey Mama, you got a baby sister in your tummy for me?"

Sigh. I could have replied, "You got an extra eight hundred a month lying around somewhere that would pay for a baby sister's daycare?"

But I replied, "No, not yet. Maybe someday."

When what I kind of wished I could say was Yes.*

Now, a Puzzler:
When we bought our house almost six years ago, my mom bought us a set of sheets with an insanely high thread count as a housewarming gift. They are soft and heavy and smooth. They are (were) perfect. They cost a fortune, as sheets go.

I mentioned once to my mom that I never used any other sheets, as we had become so spoiled by the luxury of the perfect ones. I told her how I just strip the bed in the morning to wash them and put them right back on at night.

That year, for Christmas, we got another set of sheets with an only slightly-less-insanely high thread count, though they were also soft and heavy and smooth. They also cost a pretty penny.

For the next 3 or 4 years I alternated between these two sets of sheets.

This week, we noticed a hole in the fitted sheet of the first perfect set. It was a small hole that turned in a matter of nights into a gaping, ripped slash in the fabric and was the official death of that perfect sheet. I mourned.

No, seriously. I grieved that sheet.

Last night I put our OTHER set of sheets on the bed and noticed four (FOUR! MAYBE FIVE!) smallish holes in the fitted sheet, holes just like the ones that killed my first darling sheet. I know it is only a matter of nights before we will be dragging out the green sheets with their regular thread count and bitching about how it is just like sleeping under sheets of newspaper as we grieve these two hard losses. And in such a small amount of time! It's heartwrenching.

What do you think is happening? Did they have a contagious sheet disease? Could these holes be a result of sleeping on the same sheets for six years? (though the fabric was certainly worn it did not show thin spots or major signs of wear.) What the holy eff is going on in there that took two of the most wonderful fitted sheets in the whole entire world to an early grave in just a week?

And, a Non-Story.
Tuesday during my mediocre lunch at Fazoli's in Clarksville, Tennessee (when will I learn?), I couldn't help but notice the group of middle-aged, NASCAR-moms in the booth next to me. The kind of lady who will wear a Dale Earnhardt sweatshirt with a silk-screened autograph across the back, drive a Chevy Suburban and carry two keys and nine keychain doo-dads with pictures of her kids and her sister's kids and her cat and her husband back when they were in high school, and use seven gallons of hairspray each morning to support a weird hairdo only found in the South. The kind of woman who meets her best gal pals at Fazoli's for lunch.

Please note that I'm not judging. I'm observing.

And what I observed that day was that the loudest hen of the group had a cell phone that just would not stop ringing (which she answered every time), interrupting the conversation four or five times during the meal.

Her ring tone was the theme song from "Friends." And I observed in a strictly observational way what a strange thing it was that this early forties, over-sized NASCAR mom in a medium-sized town in the mid-south SO LOVED this show about fashionable, carefree twentysomethings living in New York City, so much so in fact that her love has continued in the many years since the show went off the air, so much so that she would make sure she heard the theme song at least six thousand times a day, each time envisioning those kooky Friends splooshing around in the fountain and walking into each other's apartments unannounced.

Maybe you don't think that's interesting. I think it's interesting.


*Just to make it unmistakably clear, I am not pregnant.