We have one car that’s a champion in the snow but mice have crawled up inside the dashboard and nested in the airbag system. My warning light has been illuminated as reminder that when I fishtail and throw a 360 on slick, icy roads, I’m SOL save for a rodent family that might shoot out the steering wheel to cushion the impact. Considering the size, weight and non-absorbent make-up of the average mouse, I’ve decided to mostly stay home even though the lack of cleaning apparatus and chill of strained relations makes me want to crawl out of my itchy, winter-dry skin and flee to Florida where I hear it’s 80 and humid and there’s no such thing as chapped lips.

I suppose in this confinement, I should continue the job search I began a few days before the X-mas break wherein I write and re-write cover letters and resumes in order to send on-line responses to job listings in which I am only vaguely interested, those that appear on Monster and Craig’s List, knowing all the while that my ten years as a Landscape Designer don’t translate into value as a paralegal or administrative assistant or pharmaceutical representative but there’s always hope that some firm will see that the individual who ran her own company, wrote for a newspaper and also did time in the accounts department in an advertising firm, can and will learn this office stuff quickly and, in the interim, can probably manage the phones and tend to the ailing tropical plants suffering for light beneath the fluorescents.

I make it sound sort of optional, this employment thing but really it’s dire. In the last days of ‘08 we learned that MBH’s company would no longer be covering health insurance for dependents. So we have the expense of three on our plate in the New Year which makes for leaner times in our already skinny lives. And then there’s the latest confession – that neither of us can take one more day in the house together as a couple; working, sleeping, eating, pretending. And so we’re trying to find a way to swing rent. Some way to give ourselves some breathing room. It may, in the end, save us. Or it just may allow us to sever things in a civil manner. Either way, we see the expense as non-optional.

In order to clear the way for this added financial hit, I cancel newspaper subscriptions, I dial back the minutes on the cell phone, I cancel cable and stare meaningfully at the high-speed internet access bill wondering if we can survive on a dial-up. Wondering if the dial-up option still exists? We are wearing long underwear and turning down the thermostats. The dog shivers in her dog bed. The kids play hours of Wii and we let them, because school’s out and the wind blows negative temperatures and it’s free and we ignore their computer game dependence because their bug eyed attention to Madden ‘09 somehow assuages our guilt.

We have yet to break the news to the kids, this separation, which will confuse and disturb them even more than it does us (if that’s possible). And then there is the news to share that we are taking a leave of absence from the Country Club which really doesn’t affect their Winter lives but will completely rock their summer-time existence. I keep reminding myself that there are worse things to suffer than no swim team or tennis or golf but I feel really, really badly about this one. Possibly because we gaveth and now we taketh away. It’s one thing not to know what your missing, it’s another to miss something you once really, really enjoyed. They have friends there. They have known the sweet laze of sultry afternoons spent licking watermelon drips from their sticky arms and jumping in the chill pool to rinse their skin clean. They have known the smell of fresh mown grass on the fairway. They have known the distinct sound of tennis balls bouncing on a clay court. They have learned how to drag the brush and groom the court after play without filling their tennis shoes with clay granules. They have dressed in a sun dress and sandals and little boy khakis with a starched button-down to attend the awards ceremony at summer’s end where they receive recognition for sportsmanship and effort and achievement. They have known what it feels like to belong to this safe place, a place of well-to-do families and blue skies and a snack bar. I feel sad about a lot of things, but mostly I feel sad that I can’t continue to give them the things they have come to know as normal.

So here’s hoping that somehow, some of the next 364 days will find a way to be truly better than this one. Less uncertain and bleak and fearful and nostalgic. And here’s hoping your ‘09 is a good one, better than the last, even if your last wasn’t all that bad, because who doesn’t deserve even better?

Last night, before bed, I had put newspapers down in anticipation of the mess, having spent the day before dodging doggy-do and mopping the floor with Tilex. Still, the dog managed to hit the few spots that were un-papered – remarkable aim considering the dire circumstances that must have compelled the beast to soil the house in the first place.

What’s wrong with the dog, what’s making her ill, you ask. My answer - I don’t give a shit (I realize this is a pun, one I intended). I’ve given her half a bottle of Pepto Bismal and stern talking to about the consequences should she defecate even one more time inside the house.

I know the old adage, feed a cold, starve a fever. And feel, somehow, betrayed that the old, wise folk who develop and deliver such truths forgot to generate any catchy saying pertaining to a house-pet’s GI distress. So I’m going with the starving bit and have decided not to feed the damn dog until I observe a noticeable weakening in the shit storm.

For those of you who’ve been wondering why it’s been taking me so long to publish my next post, just imagine me down on my knees, holding my breath while dabbing ineffectually at the god-awful mess my dog has left me. Imagine how it is to be so lightheaded and exhausted from all that scrubbing and lack of oxygen and the effort expended swallowing back your own vomit, that you have no choice but to return to bed immediately after cleansing the mudroom. It’s like a swoon, an enduring faintness that really fucks with a person’s motivation and eagerness to meet the day. Imagine me hanging the Gone-Back-to-Bed-Because-This-Morning-Is-Unbearable sign on the door knob and forgive me the spotty blogging.

(Just a little part of me is currently dreaming that this bout of tummy trouble just might usher in a doggy-ending. I can hear myself saying, Natural causes. Couldn’t be helped. Doesn’t the house stay clean a lot longer without our canine friend who we remember fondly but, on days like today, could probably live without?)

As evidenced by all the leaves in this picture, I have tried a different approach this year. The close your eyes and pretend there’s not a thing wrong with the lawn approach, the hold your breath and hope someone else finds this leaf mess intolerable and eventually borrows the neighbor’s gas blower. The Who, Me? approach seems to be working so far and every other weekend the yard is restored to temporary tidiness by My Better Half who has thankfully settled in to his role as temporary but constant gardener.

And to be perfectly honest this laissez-faire attitude I have adopted is not entirely due to a new and more laid back me but more to the fact that I have serious wrist and forearm problems stewing and can proudly declare myself a winner of several fine diagnosis – De Quervian’s Syndrome, Wortenberg’s Syndrome, the beginnings of tennis elbow – all of which are orthopedic euphemism for, “Wow, your hand-wrist-arm apparatus is really fucked up. Let me give you a Cortisone shot and hope for the best because if that doesn’t work we’ll have to consider amputation.”

Simple tasks like raking, flipping pancakes, vacuuming, scrubbing the tub and folding laundry have all become excruciating antagonists to the things already gone wrong in this skinny arm of mine. And so I’ve been sidelined from some of the more banal but necessary tasks in life and, like anyone riding the pine, I’m anxious to participate. But I’m also enjoying the imposed break, nothing like a little doctor’s note to help a person settle in to a sabbatical from household chores. There is something liberating about letting things go just a little longer than I would usually. It’s so unlike me. I could get used to this slovenliness.

But then there’s the difficulty and attendant pain associated with tennis. And we all know how unlikely I am to give up the game. So I’m icing and pumping the NSAID’s and fully committed to getting this thing healed up so that I can continue to work on my court skills. And if amputation is necessary then I will be forced to play left handed. It worked for Nadal. No reason it can’t work me, right?

This is my first landscape design project since leaving Florida. I have enjoyed an almost three year sabbatical and now it is time to put on the big girl panties and get back to work despite the fact that there are chinks in the armor, holes in the lingerie. Because I have studied and practiced in a subtropical climate, I am, decidedly, no expert on Zone 6. I am faking my way through this first endeavor and so far it proves to be no different than the barely managed chaos of the projects I’ve been used to.

Today the excavation crew hit the water main and took out service to my house and the neighbor’s to the South of us. After service was restored we had chunks of copper and mud clogging our hot water tank and our toilets and the water ran brown from the taps and into the washer. We spent the entire day clearing lines and blowing out faucets after which we have clean running water again and I have that “Oh yeah, that’s why I quit landscape design and installation back in 2005″ feeling. Same shit. Different state. ‘Tis the nature of the beast and all those other platitudes I could throw at the thing. I have, in hand, large format reproductions of the property next door and I am tired already.

I find myself uttering the hackneyed phrase you don’t know how lucky you are, daily, sounding like my parents and their parents before them and wondering when I turned into my Nana, convinced that I’m but moments away from donning a bathing cap and doing the breast stroke in the lap lane. And, like all children the world over, since time began, my children successfully ignore my reprimands and scolding, my attempts to remind them that in other parts of the world, hell, in other parts of town, whole families live in tents and share bedding with their sisters.

It strikes me that lucky is a relative concept. There is always bigger, better, more and until a person experience smaller, worse and less, true understanding is just not possible. And so it is that I am contemplating developing a Fresh Air exchange program in which we invite lower-income children from Detroit, Trenton and the Bronx to come to our town for the week and work on their butterfly kick, their golf swing and the proper construction of a sand mansion while my kids take their places in their inner-city neighborhoods, delivered there by Greyhound with only a knapsack and twenty dollars stuffed in their pockets. There they will learn about dodging street fire and they will come to know the stench of urine in the stairwell on a humid summer afternoon. They will play among the shards of glass and look forward to neighborhood children yelling ‘Narcos’ whenever the police ride ’round the block to hassle the petty dealers. There they will learn to associate the summer evenings with the sounds of sirens and car alarms and the occasional domestic dispute that has spilled out into the hallway. Maybe then, when I get them back, a little strung out, sleep deprived, a whole lot wiser, will they get what I mean by lucky.

It’s not that I can’t remember the sort of lazy, free-form tangle of Summer, it’s just that I’m sure I’ve glorified those two halcyon months of childhood each year, because they couldn’t have been anywhere near as good as I remember them. My brothers and I, as children, never went to sleep-away camp or to the country club pool or took sailing lessons at the yacht club. There were no organized golf or tennis lessons and the there may have been only five days of the entire break when we even attended any structured day camp, it was an Audubon sanctioned program and we ran around in the forest, loosely supervised while capturing snakes and racing bull frogs and rolling in poison ivy. We learned the names of wild flowers, Queen Anne’s Lace and Purple Loose Strife. We earned our Audubon stripes by enduring the week-end MudWalk which was a swamp slog, waist deep in decomposing muck. It was all about emotional endurance, withstanding the indignity of leaches and mosquitoes and pockets of quicksand that captured your shoes and sucked at your shins.

The most one could hope for during this two hour trek was to avoid the urge to cry. (Jessie Allen broke down half way through the walk each year, providing the rest of us with the ammunition to make her next 11 months a living hell. In her defense, I still cannot watch a movie with American soldiers traipsing through the swamps of Vietnam holding their guns over their heads without thinking about that Mudwalk and Jessie Allen and the effort it took for ALL of us not to succumb to tears.)

Though we had a pool in the backyard, we were forced to take swimming lessons at the Town Pond which was really just a man made hole filled with startlingly green water, heavy with algae, stinking in the heat of August. The pond never warmed and there were pockets of still cold, deep in the middle, where the bottom was obscured by algae growth so thick you could feel it between your toes. We shared rumors about the various atrocities purported to lie on the bottom – dead horses, abandoned cars, the ghost of Minerva Graf who supposedly drowned a decade earlier while her mother bonked the life guard. As part of the Junior Water Rescue course we were made to swim the length of the pond and back, the whole time stroking for our lives, maintaining a speed we hoped would out-pace that of Minerva, up from the deep, surely intent on claiming a pre-teen companion.

In the evenings we played a loosely organized game we called Chase which involved a lot of hiding and running and suppressing the urge to wet your pants. Chase was best played after dusk when the fear of dark shadows and neighborhood dogs made regular old hide and seek a singular thrill. We were barefoot, we were dirty, we were probably put to bed that way each night leaving the happy smear of summer on our pillowcases.

I wish, for my children, these idealized memories of summer, memories full of taste and sound and smell sensation, singularly unique, familiar yet fabled, the sting of mosquitoes around the ankles while picking strawberries from the field, the smell of damp bathing suits and towels in a heap on the bathroom floor, the taste of salt surf on the tongue and the disappointment that is the last half of sandwich stolen by a shrieking sea gull, dinners eaten on the screened porch listening to the peculiar call of the Whipperwill just beyond the whir and pass of the lawn sprinklers at dusk, the drip of ice cream down the wrists on humid nights in August, the rush of wind while biking fast, down hill, with no hands, “the conscious yet not resentful sensation of being caught up in a web of something as tangible and fragile as thread.”

Eight weeks, 56 days, 1324 hours, 79,440 minutes of summer still to go, but who’s counting?

Quote from John Cheever’s The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well

He went on sketching the apple tree in the yard, just beyond his bedroom window until he couldn’t bear the aching nothingness of the afternoon and went down the stairs to stand in front of the open refrigerator.

“If you’re hungry, Timmy, decide what you’d like to eat before opening the fridge door. You’re letting all the cold out,” his mother said.

Timmy swiped a yogurt from the second shelf though it wasn’t what he wanted. He let the door slam and watched his mother jump. He left the utensil drawer open after removing a spoon and sat down at the weathered farm table to eat his banana strawberry yogurt from the carton. He didn’t realize that his mother was comparing him to his father. He didn’t know that his mother was busy considering whether or not standing in an open fridge or leaving utensil drawers open were learned or inherited habits. He hadn’t sensed that, just last month, she had considered leaving.

“You’d better get your cleats, Timmy,” his father called from the home office. “Ten minutes to game time.”

Timmy looked to his mother who shrugged. He had hoped that they could all forget about baseball. His mother seemed willing, eager even, to overlook the entire sport but his father came into the kitchen punching the inside of his well worn glove, the one he’d had since high school. It smelled of twenty year old sneakers and slightly of piss.

“Today’s the day, Timmy. Maybe they’ll let you pitch an inning or two. I’m guessing you’re going to hit today. I’m thinking a double or a home run,” his father said confidently. Unable to strike the right tone, his father’s over-the-top optimism only underscored the true insecurity he felt as a man who had fathered a son who had, so far, managed to strike out and miss pop flies to right field each and every weekend afternoon for the past three months.

“Don’t forget to wear your cup. I’m thinking you might get to play catcher for a bit,” his father said.

“I don’t want to play catcher, Dad,” Timmy said. Just thinking about the other team stealing bases while he bobbled the ball behind home plate made him feel nauseas.

“Don’t be silly, Timmy. You’ll be a great catcher,” his mother said sweetly though she wouldn’t come to watch the game. She had learned to leave her husband to the task of coach and spectator as he was possessive of the role, embarrassing in his urgency.

Timmy filled his mouth with another spoonful of yogurt and left the half empty carton on the table for his mother to dispose of while he climbed the stairs to find his cap and glove.

“Nonsense. Your mother’s right. You were born to catch,” his father said as he walked out the back door to start the car and wait for Timmy in the driveway, the engine running.

“Hurry,” his mother urged from the foot of the stairs. “You know how your father likes to warm you up a little before a game.”

Timmy sat on the floor of is bedroom and wriggled into the tight polyester stretch of his baseball pants. He paused to remember the last game he’d pitched. It was unfortunate that his debut on the mound had coincided with his father’s first time volunteering as umpire. Being earnest and eager to show he would play no favorites, his father had been ruthless with the calls. Timmy walked six batters and was taken out in the bottom of the third. His next at bat was a three swing strike out. Standing behind him wearing the official face mask and chest plate, his father had kicked the dirt in frustration and later cried in the shower wishing his son, Timmy, had turned out at least the athlete he had been.

Friday night was baseball in the driving rain. While I huddled at the chain link fence wishing for a squall jacket and golf umbrella, G and her father were at the annual elementary school Father-Daughter dance which is an event designed for little girls to put on sweet, once-a-year dresses and eat copious amounts of frosted confections with food coloring and caloric impact from the dessert table.

Meanwhile, the Red Sox enjoyed a rain delay while the refs at little league forced our nine year olds to swing errantly at bad pitches and stagger backwards to weave and wobble under pop flies to center field, which were inevitably missed because the ball could not be distinguished from the drift of rain and the low hanging clouds. Six innings, and an hour and a half later, they finally found the decency to call the game. We came home to thaw, throw the baseball uniform in the wash, watch the Celtics and plan for Saturday morning’s soccer game and Saturday afternoon’s baseball game and Saturday afternoon’s post baseball game outing to the town festival featuring rides called the Octopus and The Himalayan (rusty, Carnie standards that inspire fear and wonder not for the insane thrill they offer but for the anxiety we all feel allowing our children to strap into these rusty ancient contraptions hastily erected by retarded people with no teeth).

There were deep lines for fried dough and candy apples and even deeper lines for games designed to fleece us of our dollars while pursuing the big win – cheaply made but impressively sized, overstuffed animals created solely to capture the eye of six year old girls who simply must try over and over to win the ring toss.

Sunday morning saw day break and mandatory 8:30 a.m. baseball practice because, I suppose, both a Friday evening and a Saturday afternoon game was simply not enough little league for one weekend. And tonight, well, there’s piano and yet another baseball game in the gusty chill of a spring evening but there’s great relief on this mother’s part that there is leftover Chinese in the fridge and no rain in the forecast.

The opposing team was twenty deep and they made up for their lack of talent by having the most over-wrought parents in the history of six year old soccer squads. There is supposed to be one coach per team on the field orchestrating play, acting as casual referees. There are no whistles. There are multiple water breaks. We are supposed to stop and wait for shoes to be tied and shin guards adjusted and every once in awhile someone cries and we stop for that too. But this squad (I’ll call them the Collies in interest of anonymity), took the field with a shockingly aggressive attitude. They had three parents on the field at all times yelling, I mean yelling at their players, not cheering or making hopeful suggestions but physically moving the girls around, harping on them when their attention wandered, herding them up and back, barking orders. The Collies didn’t stop for our four girls when we needed a cleat tied or a water break or when little Samantha got hit in the nose and needed to have a good sob.

They were fixated on the win (the Collie parents), driving their progeny towards the goal. the children responded with the energy and purpose of kids accustomed to an afternoon of parental reprisal should they lose the game. As soon as I heard one parent say, “Just throw it in, it doesn’t matter if the other team’s ready,” I knew it was time to dig in ’cause that’s what we Greyhounds do. We take the challenge and chase the bait and run our little fannies off just to deny the families of privilege their expected victory. And the Greyhounds, all four of them, took on the twenty-deep Collie squad and kicked their well groomed asses. I’ve been cruising on that sweet victory for three days now.

After the soccer game, there was a baseball game attended by normal and well balanced parents wearing layers of fleece under rain gear all of which have developed the indisputable signs of ensuing head colds, the Derby party, (which was fun and festive save for the dead horse at the finish line which cast the momentary shadow of gloom (death is good like that) and made the party guest claiming second place in the betting pool feel somehow dishonest. We polled the group as to how important it was that your horse actually trot off the race track and came to unanimous decision that Eight Belles won second place fair and square despite the fact that her life ended minutes later and therefore second place prize money should be paid out. Then we all indulged in another round of mint juleps, desperate to shake off the grim reality of that scene with the equine ambulances on the racetrack). By the time Sunday rolled around, a tennis-related conflict was merely the cherry on the cake of a strange and surreal 48 hours.

It’s a big week in tennis for me and my team mates. We have cruised through the semi-finals after winning our division and now play for the banner and cheesy little plastic trophies on Wednesday. A few of us thought it’d be a good idea to get together Sunday morning and bat the ball around. When we made these tennis plans earlier in the week, 8 a.m. didn’t sound as early as it felt the morning after a bourbon-centric dinner party. Needless to say, my goals for the morning were simple: stay upright; don’t throw up on the service line. To quote W’s hackneyed phrase – mission accomplished.

While we weren’t out there breaking records with serve speed or the velocity of our over heads, we all played decently and got some important touch on the ball before the big match. Since I was concentrating on the basics, like breathing and holding down breakfast, I wasn’t really focused on the score of the games we were playing nor was I really paying a whole lot of attention to the play strategy on the other side of the court. But after receiving a Sunday afternoon e-mail comprised of a bulleted dissection of my play that morning complete with tight analysis of my partner and I’s failure to talk on the court and the observation that we forgot to bring our power serves that morning, I was left feeling that I had missed the memo on the purpose of Sunday morning play which, I had always thought was for extra practice, but had apparently, somewhere along the way, turned into an opportunity for team mates to play professional coach and develop laundry lists of observed errors and oversights to deliver to each other’s in-boxes later in the day.

It may have been a well intentioned attempt to help us be successful in Wednesday’s match but it came off as a pedantic, scolding and obviously flawed analysis of our tennis game by someone who usually plays a lower court than we do and has no claim to professional prospective. Timing, delivery and personal claim to authority on the topic at hand are important factors to consider when playing critic.

I probably should have let it slide, let it simmer in my in-box for awhile. But then I wouldn’t be me. So I promptly fired off a passive aggressive retort designed to signify my displeasure while pointing out that until this team mate develops her own version of a pace serve instead of that marshmallow she’s currently putting in the service box, she will never understand the difficulty of firing off a ninety mile an hour missive while swallowing your own stomach bile.

I also couldn’t pass up the opportunity to point out that her greatest strength on the court is her partner, who is a lefty and therefore causes all manner of trouble for those of us who have been trained to target backhands down the middle. I congratulated her on the success they’ve enjoyed as team this year and pointed out that she should be very thankful for her alliance with someone who makes her opponents have to stop, think and completely alter all instinctual play.

Here’s how some of my reply e-mail went:

Truth be told, I took the court this morning after a long night of mint juleps and about three hours sleep – so the point for me was to have fun and get some touch on the ball before Wednesday. I was in no way expecting a dissertation on our play nor am I prepared to give a dissertation on your game…I was really just trying to stay upright and didn’t have the mental equilibrium to be taking notes.

What I will say is that I think we all have strengths and weaknesses as tennis players. One of the great advantages that you and your partner have is her left-handedness. She’ll always be an asset on the court b/c all the text book rules on where to put the ball are reversed for your opponents. A lot of thinking often leads to errors on the part of the team who has to change their instinctual play. It will always take your opponents some time to adjust to the awkwardness of the set up. That’s a huge boon for you guys.

As for my partner and I not using our big serves until late in the game – Anyone with a power serve will tell you that doubles is a difficult forum in which to rush the hard, fast serve. It takes awhile to warm up and since, in doubles, a player only serves every four games rather than every other, the pace serve is usually the weapon that doesn’t turn fully fire up until the second set. It’s just a matter of needing to be loose, relaxed and warm when going for the big serve.

The spin serve is the safety serve that players often need to use at the beginning of play, when they are feeling pressure or when they haven’t yet found their groove. Even tournament tennis players have to fight out of early match jitters and find the muscle fluidity to begin putting in ace serves (This obviously takes the ranked professional player less time than it takes those of us who play recreationally. There have been whole matches that I haven’t found my big serve. But a spin serve is better than a double fault. I suspect that as you develop the pace on your serve, you will see what I’m talking about.)

Wednesday’s a big day, but I think our entire team can be satisfied that we’ve all played a great season, no matter what happens. I won’t be presumptuous and tell you that you should change things in the last week of a thirty week season right before a final. Obviously, whatever you’ve been doing has been working for you thus far.

As with everything, some days on the tennis court are better than others. We can all hope for a good day on Wednesday but most importantly we can congratulate ourselves on a season well played, regardless of the outcome of Wednesday’s match.

It’s uber-important that we all trust ourselves, trust our partners and just go out there and play tennis this week without getting caught up in the import of the playoff moment, without trying to change our game or the dynamics we’ve established on the court already with our partners, at the last minute, in the nervous rush of pre-match jitters.

I plan to do what I do. I hope to do it well and with confidence. I plan to take it one point at a time. My partner and and I have a little mantra now…watch the seams of the ball, concentrate on breathing between points, be in the moment.

All I can hope for is that she and I leave the court feeling like we played well – win, lose or draw. I wish that for you too. Keep it light, keep it fun, don’t think too hard.

Okay, so it wasn’t quite the bitch slap I really wanted to deliver. I do have some self restraint, knowing when to avoid being un-salvageably vituperative. Even I could see that it was not a good idea to start my reply with,

Dear Team Mate And Average Tennis Player Who I Used to Call Friend But Now, After Today’s E-mail and Last Week’s Odd Decision to Begin Serving While Your Opponent Was Standing At the Sideline Having A Drink of Water, May Be More of an Acquaintance,

Who died and made you coach?

Like sands through the hour glass, those are the days of our lives and so the world turns here on Wisteria Lane where shiny happy people take their psycho-pharmaceuticals and play tennis while ignoring ethnic cleansing in Africa, the slow ravages of cancer, the high price of gasoline, the war in Iraq and the debacle which is the Democratic Primary.

To quote the Talking Heads, again, “You may ask yourself – well, how did I get here?

And then it’s home again to begin preparing for Saturday’s Derby gathering. It’s a simple menu of bourbon, lard and coconut but there is some do-ahead required not to mention the requisite house cleaning, rose purchasing and mashing of the mint leaves for Julep consumption.

Go Z Humor and Monba and Pyro and Smooth Air and Big Brown. Run your tails off while I drink my face off and please don’t stumble, I hate to see a horse fall. Leave the blundering and banging into things to me and my intoxicated guests.

Happy Friday everyone, Happy Weekend too.