Oh hey guys, and welcome to the first of our Freelance Fridays. I love alliteration, and continuity, so I figured why not use both? What else am I doing, anyway?
Well hold onto your hats, because…plenty. Turns out I’m doing plenty.
Like what?, you asked without words, even if you didn’t remember asking me a #&!*A!@ thing.
First of all, my shampoo bottle was running low yesterday. It’s seriously easy to take the refillable bottle, walk three steps to the closet, get out the giant pump bottle, and refill it. For that reason and so many more, I put it off – until yesterday, when I realized it was fuel-light-low empty. After a quick self-pep talk but before I could change my mind, I launched it grenade-style over the curtain into the closet. That way, I had to go to the closet and get it out anyway, so I may as well fill it UP.
It worked like a charm. I started pumping the large bottle into the smaller bottle, as you do, and immediately felt stupid and told myself to go get a funnel or something. But I’d already started, plus the funnel would just take longer and then I’d have to wash it and then it would have turned into a whole thing, so then I was like, well, count the number of pumps it takes to fill it up, then you just KNOW. And then I remembered the beautiful simplicity of the original Tootsie Roll pop and the number of licks it takes and started to think about how I’ve never been good at making those or any other hard candy last and it’s a wonder I have teeth at all and I should really start brushing after every meal and before you knew it, the bottle was full and my hand had a vague arthritic hand cramp.
And it had taken 45 pumps.
See, here’s the thing. I’m 45 years old, so that meant in the hand pump equivalent, I basically had arthritis.
That’s not all I’ve been doing, though. Today at the Kum & Go Fresh Market (I highly recommend the whole chain, and not only because we don’t have a QuikTrip here), they had Christmas candy out. Never mind that HALLOWEEN IS TOMORROW GIVE ME THE WEEKEND AT LEAST, they had it out, bold as hell, on its own end cap.
My rage lasted almost no time, though, because they had Reese’s Christmas Trees in both milk and white chocolates, as well as Snickers Christmas Trees. Still, though, I’d already staked it out as my hill to die on, so I was planning to boycott until Josh mentioned that he was going to get the Reese’s trees. There was no sense in leaving one behind, plus I like to reassess each season to make sure I didn’t change which was my favorite, so I jumped up, brushed myself off, and ran from that hill by paying money for the very thing I had just sworn to hate. Fortunately, there are plenty more hills to die on, if I know anything about hills. And, as I suspected, Reese’s was still my favorite, so we got that out of the way early this year.
The point is, Happy Halloween, everyone. It’s not only Halloween (my favorite holiday of the year, but my future daughter-in-law Shelby’s birthday, and she’s great. So let’s just back that ass up off of Christmas until at least next week. Thanks. Gonna go massage my hand cramp now.
Oh! Also we got new ceiling fans. See you next time, for more Freelance Fridays!

Here they are. It’s real. The other ones were so low we hit our heads. For five years.