Fifteen Minutes to Glory

My parents will be here at the end of a long string of fifteen minuteses, more precisely, about 3:00pm Eastern tomorrow. Because the house be a wreck, I have just this evening started working my way through each room, fifteen minutes at a time, a la my guru, The FlyLady. She tells me, "You can do anything for fifteen minutes," and I trust her. I've trusted her for three years now--she hasn't failed me yet. I wear my silver Sunbeam timer set to 15:00 clipped to my pocket, enter a room, hit the start button, and get working. When the timer goes off, I stop where I am and either take a 15 minute break or move to the next room. If the kids cooperate tomorrow, we should finish up the house by about noon. This means I must wake up early on my only day to sleep in a little, Sunday, but for Mother and Daddy, it's worth it. And, you may have guessed, you Murphy's Lawyers, that our guest room toilet is not working at the moment. And the toilet guy who sleeps with me doesn't have the right flapper-ball-cocks to fix it, and so must hie him to Lowe's tomorrow morning (when do they open on a Sunday?) to get some such replacement gasketto to stop the mass leakage that occurs when we let water into the damn thing.

So, the rents arrive tomorrow and leave for Alabama on Wednesday. Twenty-four hours later, husband's next older brother (he has three) arrives from Florida into Philly airport, probably while we are en route from Atlantic City back to home after the Weezer show. He just told us his arrival time, so, what to do? Anyhoo, he'll be here through the weekend, and will celebrate with us the N-kid's second birthday this Saturday. He will leave Sunday night. THEN, then, my friends, I will probably need a day to recuperate and t-h-e-n, m-a-y-b-e, I will be able to get back to my writing. I started this god-forsaken novel six years ago on a three-week vacation to Spain with my mother. It's gonna take another six years to finish it, I swanee! (My wonderful friend Dana says "I swanee!" I had only heard "I swan!" up to meeting Dana. Who's not from the South? Raise your hands. "I swan!" is a genteel way of saying "I swear!" in such cases as happening upon your Uncle Rondo wearing your perfectly good pink kimono as he swings in the hammock under the magnolia, sipping iced tea. But I digress...) This novel will take me a long time to finish writing, for it just cain't be done in fifteen minute blocks of time. It takes me fifteen minutes just to come up with one word sometimes.

...and please forgive me, Miss Welty.