Steve Miller

Balls in the air. (Hey, get your mind out of the sewer, you.) I mean, I'm juggling. No, not even juggling so much as just doing a few things I should do as a matter of course, but never get around to. Last week I had a routine physical at my GP (such as I have basically never done) and my six-months-overdue girly-bits exam. Today I got my flu shot at Safeway and booked a haircut for tomorrow. I would have requested Mabel's passport forms (her Irish passport will expire soon), but the embassy phone is out of order. Not my fault. The only other major thing is a dental checkup, which I promise to book for myself (and Mabel, come to think of it) when we take Monkey to his appointment next Tuesday. I even hemmed my cords so I can wear them with my boots. I'm so smug I'm practically incandescent.

But this comes at a price. The bathroom needs cleaning (when does it not?) and I'm neglecting my blog. I decide what to make for dinner twenty minutes before dinnertime. I haven't made muffins in ages. (Okay. About a week. And I did make zucchini bread, but I prefer muffins.)

I'll probably fall off this efficiency wagon any day now, but once the phonecalls are made and the appointments written on the calendar, most of it just proceeds as scheduled. I'll throw some new balls up - birthday-party planning, trip-to-New-York planning, housework, even - and juggle them for a while instead, and bit by bit things will happen, or not happen, and we'll all totter onwards regardless.

My son might think that time is an infititely large elastic band that stretches to encompass whatever it is he's doing, and then springs back to get us where we need to be at the appointed moment - but I know better. It just keeps on slipping into the future.