Incoherent Scribblings

When I walked in the door yesterday morning from work, Mom said to me, “Umm… I think you forgot something last night.”

I already knew this because I seriously considered calling her at about 12:30 am last night and filling her in on the incident, but after I realized what happened I also knew it wouldn’t do any good anyway.

On Wednesday evening (at midnight, Wednesday turns into my Thursday), Mom and I went out for pizza at the local pizza chain restaurant. Now, at this particular pizza place, I just so happen to enjoy their breadsticks enough that I will often order them for my meal and just skip the pizza. On this particular occasion I did so. However, about half way through my breadsticks, I thought it would be handy if I ordered one of those mini-pizzas to go so that I could take it to work with me for a midnight snack. (Pardon the pun )

15 minutes before I had to leave the house for work I gathered all the necessary items on the dining room table to get me through a shift: Coke (minimum 2 cans), flannel shirt (to keep warm in our chilly office), contact and glasses case with glasses (no matter how little I wear them during the day, my contacts insist on coming out around 3 am), and a few other items. And last evening, I also laid the pizza box containing my cold pizza on the table.

About 5 minutes before I left, I decided I needed a grocery bag to carry all my crap so I went looking for one under the kitchen sink. As I looked under the sink I realized I was out of luck as Mom had just donated all of our used plastic grocery sacks to the yard sale committee for the city-wide garage sales next weekend.

At this point I was afraid I was going to be late, so I gave up on the sack, blocked the kitchen door to prevent Olee (FYI: Olee is our 15 year old three-legged cat that terrorizes everything) from entering the kitchen overnight, turned off the lights, gathered up my stuff, walked out the door, and locked it. (I know I have mentioned that in Small Town Iowa we don’t lock out doors. That is usually true, except Step-dad insists we lock the door at night.)

When I got to work, the dispatcher that works the shift before me offered to leave me a couple of sandwiches that she had brought with her but not eaten. I turned her down, stating that I had pizza to eat…

But suddenly I couldn’t remember putting my pizza in the office fridge. I told her I would be back in a second, I had to run out to my car for something. I looked on the passenger seat, but lo and behold, I had forgotten my pizza and left it on the dining room table at home. The dispatcher told me it was OK, she would stay if I wanted to run home for a second and get my pizza, but I declined.

For you see, it wouldn’t have done me any good to go home anyway: Not only did I suspect it would take Olee all of 15 minutes to find and destroy the box before eating the cheesy pizza that I had left on the dining room table, I had locked the front door before I left home and I don’t have a key to the house!