Could I start this day over?

The usual sounds and smells that are welcome to wake me up in the morning are the subtle waft of caffeine perking out of the coffeemaker and the beeps that spell “Ready,” the drift to the nostrils of fresh bread baked by timer in the bread maker, and the smell of bacon. Bacon rocks. 

Of course none of these wonderful stimuli avail themselves in my neck of the woods. Nope.

Instead I was yanked before sunrise from my fantasy dream of Matthew McConaughey rescuing me from a sinking boat and into an immediate wide-eyed state—thrust immediately conscious to the grunting sound of “Millie” the cat about to throw up beside me on my bedspread. 

I channelled Kung Fu from the ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’ movie, leapt from the sheets into mid-air, grabbed my housecoat with one hand while doing a half twist across to the other side of the bed and lifting the cat from her heaving position with the other hand, landed on the floor with two feet stuck in an Olympic gold medal gymnastics pose. 

I threw open the bedroom door, and in the dark, bolted into the kitchen, leapt over the garbage can, arms outstretched for the door handle in a frantic effort to release said feline into the porch to throw up.

And I hope for anything that didn’t just come from inside a animal—and more importantly that none of it gets on me. 

Needless to say that kind of good luck doesn’t avail itself to me in my neck of the woods. Nope.  

The cat didn’t make it to the porch before expelling the contents of her stomach.

And the situation was much worse when I didn’t see the wet blob of a thing on the floor before I flicked on the lights at 5 a.m. and I stepped in it.

As the warm, oozing chunky globule squeezed up through the toes of my foot I was wishing that it had at least been below body temperature. 

Blind as a bat because I didn’t have my contact lenses in, I squinted to identify the thing, bending over to get a better look, only to find what was left of a mouse’s head and front teeth soaked in a mustard-yellow slime looking up at me from between my toes. I wanted to unplug and jump into a cartoon black hole and disappear to a Florida beach. 

The two other cats skulking the mystery from under the kitchen table dared not venture forth, as I expect they understood perfectly the fragmented angry English slang erupting from my mouth. I began hopping on one foot towards the bath tub trying not to spread the goo everywhere, but Murphy’s Law dictated otherwise because I couldn’t hold the one-legged pose like I did when I was 20 years old and ended walking the slime across the floor. 

If this morning affair was the only bad luck tohappen on the first day of the workweek I would have made amends with a vat of “Caldwell” coffee, a loaf of fresh bread, and a pound of bacon. Of course that is never the case in my neck of the woods. Nope.

But that’s another story.