Last week he was pushing a commercial plane back from a gate in San Diego when the forward flight attendant called and told him an emergency in the cabin necessitated they get back to the gate. Quickly. So he went, as fast as a fat bellied commercial airliner can go, and as soon as  he could he came out from behind the Kevlar door to a scene that was playing out like something from the latest Hollywood thriller. In the aisle lay an elderly man, bluish and not breathing while his wife stood, staring, mouth agape. Her husband was dying, in public, away from family on the peanut dust covered floor between rows 2 and 4. Somehow, in the midst of it all, three firemen and a nurse came forward, seamlessly and without effort. As my father stood, calling 911 and telling other passengers to remain calm and seated, and a flight attendant quietly cried in the galley, these four individuals pulled out emergency kits. Gauze. Syringes. Orders flew and vitals were shouted and my Dad said that seconds felt like hours but hours felt like seconds as they took turns pumping the man’s chest up and down, up and down, up and down. Paddles were applied and the rest of the 130 odd people sat, transfixed, quiet, as the four individuals spoke in a language no one else understood. The nurse rifled through supplies, handing things forward, needles, drips, medication. Eventually paramedics arrived, each slowly integrating themselves into the din of confusion, and as this man remained unconscious it was as though the tiny aisle of the plane- the one that never fits you and your bag without whacking someone in the kneecap as you make your way down- widened, allowing a total of 7 grown men and women access to the frail body of a man whose health was failing. A gurney was brought on, and suddenly, without reason or answer, the man began to pink up. He began to breathe, albeit labored, but his eyes fluttered open for a brief second and locked with those of his wife who was standing grasping the hand of a flight attendant.

As quickly as it all began the mess was gone and the passenger was wheeled off. My Dad retired his crew and requested new flight attendants, allowing the ones who had just kept an airliner calm in the height of emergency the privacy to break down. Passengers were given a quick break and the wife squeezed my Dad’s hand in thanks before following her husband to the waiting ambulance.

My Dad stepped forward, hesitant, and waiting for one of the firemen to introduce the rest to him. He wanted to shake these heroes hands, to hear about their years together and how it all transpired. Instead, the men stood in front of him just as expectantly. Waiting for him to begin the introductions. As he cleared his throat and began, the Captain of the ship, each man slowly introduced himself and his home town. It seemed that none of them had met before. They each just happened to be on the plane. They didn’t know the emergency room nurse either. They were all just…there….and came forward, bringing the gear they paid for themselves and burning through supplies without a thought of who was picking up the bill. There had been a convention in town, for firemen, and they were all just working their way home after a long weekend of learning and networking. It was simply fate that brought them, and their odd language of vital signs and medical jargon and smooth transitions between taking turns giving CPR on the same flight home, the same flight where a man all but died on the floor of the cabin, before suddenly coming back to life in front of a plane full of onlookers.

Sometimes, it seems, the world works in mysterious ways.

My fear about the repercussions of living alone began after I talked to a friend who had a real friend in New York City who couldn’t get rid of a strange odor for weeks on end only to discover it was the dead, decomposing next door neighbor. I know! I know! Only an urban legend you say. Well, perhaps to you it is still an urban legend because really a story that starts with “Well, see, this girl, who I don’t know, I just read her blog, anyway, her friend had a friend, and HE ACTUALLY HAD A DECOMPOSING NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR” doesn’t really qualify as “convincing” but for me- who has a much stronger connection to said person in NYC (whose name I do not know but lets be real here, it is still fairly convincing) who actually had the decomposing neighbor, well, my fear became real.

The fear that I’d do something really dumb and then have to crawl, over the course of days to the front door only to be stymied by the lock so I’d croak inches from freedom and help. I had images of my mummified body being found months later, with neighbors shaking their heads muttering “I knew something was going on in there….” or my doorman becoming concerned I didn’t pick up a package and coming in and finding me with the bugs and creepy crawlies using my body as their personal condominium. You might scoff and laugh, but I have a track record of doing really dumb things. See also: the time I woke up on my kitchen floor after knocking myself out on the corner of a kitchen cabinet as I unloaded the dishwasher. See also: the time I impaled myself on broken Pyrex.

My fear really was founded in reality y’all.

So, soon after moving into my fancy new studio I sent my parents a set of keys and gave the doorman explicit instructions that if they called and demanded he check on me, he had to listen. After all, a drippy dead body does nothing for property value. I then gave my parents instructions that if they didn’t hear from me for two days- unreturned phone calls, emails, texts, what have you, they had to call my doorman to come and make sure I was still breathing.

I’m happy to report I made it through 4+ years of living alone without ever needing a well-being check. A few times my Mom came *thisclose* to telling the doorman to bust in on me, but this was always during finals when I was busy wearing the same outfit for a week straight and nodding off into my casebooks, so she cut me some slack and gave me an extra few hours to respond. I always did. My point being people: you can never be too sure. And if you smell something weird coming from your neighbor’s house, you should definitely call someone to see whats up. Mummified bodies are a real pain to deal with. Or at least they always are on CSI. Which might have been the ‘friend’ my friend was telling me about.

Whatever. It could happen.

Go on over here to see who won the ASSETS give away!

Psssst, if you are interested in winning some Spanx, enter my give-away here!

Today is my husband B’s 29th birthday.

(Which means his 30th birthday is also his Golden Birthday and that means at this time, next year, we will do something extra special!)

Happy Birthday Darling! This means I shall take the opportunity to tease you a little. Natch.

Saturday night we celebrated B’s birthday with friends by going out for some delicious oysters, burgers & beer. Happy birthday indeed! As the night wore on The Namby Pamby and B parted ways from the ladies of the group and went out to the bars for guy time, which roughly translates to: too many tequila shots.  This of course meant that Sunday he woke up with what some might refer to as a “raging hangover.” Unfortunately for B the best I could do was toss him a Perrier and run off to meet some internet friends for a day at the Children’s Museum, which meant that the Sunday errand of grocery shopping was on him.  What could go wrong?

You see where this is going don’t you?

It means that instead of 2 cans of tomato sauce for the lasagna, we had 2 cans of diced tomatoes.

There was no Greek yogurt to be found.

There was also no string cheese. Or fruit. Or potatoes, sweet or russet.

I also can’t find the cheese or baguette for his birthday dinner request of home made french onion soup.

We don’t have any of the ingredients for shrimp & penne pasta which I’m making on Wednesday for a group of lovely ladies, but that is because B thought I said I was making risotto. Which we also don’t have the ingredients for because he forgot them.

I did however find a roll of strawberry Mentos, 2 bags of tortilla chips, and a new toy for the dog.

Happy birthday sweetheart! Enjoy your Kindle! We are having cheese-less onion nachos for dinner & Mentos for dessert!

Oh & of course, in case you missed it, I’m holding a giveaway- SPANX!- over here. It just takes a comment to enter!

This week, as I was reading my blog-friend Lacey (Perks of Being a Jap) it hit me that I have a nagging to-do list. You know, those things that you keep telling yourself you really should get to. The things that never get done, that slowly pile up until the dog literally knocks them over, or the time comes that you need the project done & it isn’t and you just kind of hate yourself for never getting around to it. This weekend I’ve decided I’m knocking things off that list, one by one, and cleaning up the mind clutter that accumulates around them. No more reminding myself as I drive home from work or nod off to sleep that I really just need to…yeah..I’ll get that done….tomorrow?

• Order replacement lenses for B’s sunglasses that he dropped on a tile floor (DONE!)

• Take my new wool coat to the seamstress to have the sleeves taken up (Not done….)

• Drop off the bag of clothes I’m donating to our local thrift shop (DONE!)

• Start. Working. On. The. Curtains. (Step one: buy curtain rod & steam curtains) (DONE!)

• Gather up sweaters that need mending (stupid moth!) and get them to Without A Trace (Not done…)

• Research picture frames – it is getting time to swap out all the random photo frames I have in the guest room & master bedroom for some more uniform brushed nickle frames. (Suggestions anyone? I’m looking to do this inexpensively.) (Research begun)

•  Drop off the dry cleaning (Not done…)

•  Take old towels to the boat trailer (DONE!)

• Decide, once and for all, what to do with our wicker bar stool that suddenly disintegrated. Fix it or toss it, but for goodnes sakes, no more waffling! (DONE!)

•  Buy more file folders & finally finish filing everything in the filing cabinet- no more piles in the office on top of the filing cabinet. (DONE!)

I’ll report back on Monday…but in the interim…what about you?

1. I will space them out. This isn’t going to become a promotional zone.

2. Every give away will be hosted on my subdomain: www.blog.daisyjd.com, not on my main page. You will have to click over & you will know that you will be reading a sponsored post. This means you will never get to the bottom of a post only to discover it is/was sponsored.

3. I won’t make you jump through 1000 hoops to enter a contest. I agree that entering a contest should be something simple, not a long process of Tweeting, Facebook following & the like.

Speaking of…… if you click over to my subdomain you might found an awesome giveaway of the Spanx/ASSETS variety….

Apparently not everyone vacuums their dryer?

Or rotates couch cushions…every night.

Or wipes baseboards once a week?

Anyone?

Yeah, well join the ranks of people who mock me. Who tease me about tidying underneath my cupboards once a month. For dumping out sock and skiivie drawers just as often, and resorting and folding. Those who laugh at the way I carefully wipe out all the fridge shelves and drawers on a regular, germ-free basis. I’ll just mention that my bathroom is always tidy & you can rest assured that the towel you are drying your hands on is fresh as a summer breeze.

What I’m saying is: MOCK AWAY. And BOW DOWN.

Yeah that’s right. When I was at BlogHer I filled out a survey for Quickie in exchange for a nifty microfiber sponge, and apparently, out of the 100′s who filled it out, I was one of the few who got 17/18 points. The only question I really *remember* was one about how often I clean my baseboards (weekly; natch) but I think it was a quiz designed exactly for crazy, neurotic, CLEAN people like myself. So now I’m a big winner and I won an entire package of cleaning supplies and there really isn’t much more to say other than: Neener. Neener. Neener.

And Mom, you can no longer get tiffy with me when I clean out your fridge for you. I won a prize for these mad skills! But I do promise to stop trying to reorganize your closet. That might actually be bordering on creepy. (But when I say I’m cleaning out under your bathroom sink? I’m really just stealing all your Aveda products. You buy good stuff!)

*Dear FTC: Other than the nifty sponge I grabbed in the Expo Hall at BlogHer in exchange for my quiz answers, I have no relationship with Quickie. They didn’t ask for me to write a post, or pay me money. I mean, yes, they are rewarding my holy cleanliness, but it was a PRIZE, and I’m not so much endorsing their products (I’ve only used one sponge!) as much as I’m saying that they deserve a hug for recognizing my genius for what it is.

It has been five years since I moved to Chicago.

It has been five years since I wrecked my car in a fender bender the day before I graduated from college.

It has been five years since Hurricane Katrina formed over the ocean, and it is getting close to five years to the day that she barrelled over the Gulf Coast.

Have I mentioned that I lived in New Orleans for the four years prior to Hurricane Katrina? I moved, just before the storm, holding on to my old 504 area code and a glass jar of my prettiest Mardi Gras catches. Law school started and we were not more than a week in when suddenly, I was distracted by images and stories of the town that turned me into who I was…turning into some putrid. Rotten. Swollen to the brim with murky water, the air filled with eerie silence and cries for help and animals searching for their owners. Not the sounds I was accustomed to; the rumble of the street car late at night and hum of mosquitoes and the clinks of melting ice in glasses on front porches.

I can’t really tell you what that fog was like for the first week, other than to say I looked at every single photo posted on major American news sites. I saw photos of friends waist deep in water, of favorite places left in wet ruins. I spent a lot of time sending emails and making phone calls, trying to track down friends and loved ones. Were they in Atlanta? Houston? Had they made it Shreveport or only to Baton Rouge?

I went back in January of 2006 and volunteered my time for a week. I wore work gloves and masks and I pulled carpet and molded dry wall out of two homes. I ate cold military ration meals and I cried a lot. This place was so familiar and yet so foreign and it didn’t seem like I was even making a dent.

On my own, I probably didn’t make a dent. But my efforts, in combination with the efforts of hundreds of thousands of other volunteers; some as organized as the American Red Cross, others in school groups like my own, made a dent. We tossed and sorted and nailed and drilled and slowly but surely New Orleans rose from the rubble, like a modern day phoenix. Built on the sweat and tears and belief of its residents, both literally and those who adopted it, realizing that America needed the City That Care Forgot to be…complete.

Favorite places slowly reopened, some with new management most with new floors. Plaques were quietly nailed to walls marking the water line at that particular location. Red beans & rice began to bubble away on stove tops and Mardi Gras Krewes rebuilt their floats & tossed beads once again.

In January of 2010, when the New Orleans Saints won the Superbowl, I cried quietly. B asked me why I wasn’t more outgoing, why I wasn’t whooping and hollering. I couldn’t explain, I couldn’t say much other than to keep repeating the phrase ”I Believed” as tears spilled out of my eyes. The Superdome, once the place where I graduated from college, then an international symbol for human suffering and despair had suddenly become the home of the greatest football team that year. The home of fans and residents who stood by a team and a city that no one else had much hope for.

New Orleans, I always believed. I always will.

And I will always come home.

- If The Namby Pamby is your lawyer, you should probably make him sign an agreement that g-chat conversations are not billable.

- Metal trays, when removed from a toaster oven that has been “on” for 20 minutes, are rather hot.

That ought to cover it for today.

However, when you live in the city you live in close proximity to your neighbors. Which can be fantastic, but at other times, trying. And unlike the suburbs, which offer you a cushion of space between you and the dog that just won’t stop yapping, oh my goodness, HUSH the city means you either suffer in silence or confront it. Which is why I was a bit shocked to answer my door this weekend to find our down-the-hall-neighbor, who is only in town every few weeks. The neighbor (and her husband) own the parking spots on either side of ours, which means 90% of the time I have all the space in the world to park my car, and 10% of the time I spend 10 minutes pulling into the spot, precariously, because my neighbors? ARE THE WORST PARKERS IN THE WORLD. They also drive very fancy cars, which only makes me more nervous as I try to park between two walleyed luxury sedans driven by owners that don’t understand how the painted lines work. They did nothing to further their cause when they started bringing their dog with them, the dog that never stops barking, that they acknowledge never stops barking, and yet, they bring him any way! Bark bark bark! And because I don’t want to ruffle feathers, I’ve yet to say a word about Barker McBarkerton or their horrible parking, all in the name of keeping up foreign relations.

I’ve digressed. My point was, when said neighbor showed up at my door to ask me to move my car because I was “grossly over the painted line and there was no way their car was going to fit in their spot” (grossly over = I was touching the line) and then, when stymied by my guppy-mouthed shock in which I couldn’t form a coherent sentence to respond, filled in the blank by asking if I was aware of whose puppy was barking all night long and keeping them up all night, I began thinking that those suburbs sounded pretty darn good. If only for a night.  So I could figure out how to convince our neighbors it was time to move.

(How about you? City, suburban or rural?)

(My parents live in a very rural area. I liken it to The Shining.)

(Seriously. The county prosecutor is also a local snowplow driver. Or something equally ridiculous like that. I’d pay more attention to the story but I’m too busy stocking up my rations in case the power goes out and we are shut off from the rest of the world.)