Hi, Linda:

Thank you for your nice, newsy letter . . . it did improve my day, but rather than try to write the long, newsy reply it deserves, let me tell you why it was so much appreciated:

Have you ever had one of "those" days? I mean the kind of day where the first thing you do when you wake up-after disentangling yourself from a sheet that took on an evil life of its own and viciously tried to strangle you-is to stub your big toe on the bed frame? Whining miserably, you discover that someone has stolen your left slipper during the night? And you know it has been stolen because you would surely remember hopping around the house with one slipper on your way to bed?

With one slipper, you hobble to the kitchen, somehow managing to strike the door jamb a fearsome blow with your shoulder, even though you are well aware of where it is . . . IT being both the door jamb AND your shoulder?

After making it that far with only one slipper and a couple of battle wounds, you turn on the burner to heat the water for your desperately needed caffeine fix of instant coffee and stagger off to the bathroom. Feeling somewhat relieved, nursing a faint glimmer of hope that everything might turn out all right after all, you find that the last scrap of toilet paper in the house has departed for distant places during the night, leaving only a crumpled cardboard roller to mark its passage.

It is better for all concerned not to dwell on the sordid aspects of that problem, which can be solved by most males with a brisk shake but which requires, in the case of female persons, a kind of duck-waddling drip-dry procedure . . . with which I'm sure you are familiar?

Then, while making dispirited fanning gestures at your nether parts to hurry the drip-dry process, you discover your other slipper sitting in lonely splendor in the bathtub? And while staring at it in disbelief, you see that the bathtub is decorated with repulsively scummy rings that, like the rings on a tree trunk, seem to mark the passage of many years since it was last cleaned.

After a period of mental numbness, you recover enough to clearly remember scrubbing the tub yesterday afternoon, and this gives you enough confidence to be sure that if you HAD left your slipper in the bathtub, you would remember that, too? Then, you recover your slipper and sit down on the commode to put it on . . . and find that you have forgotten to put the lid down?

Holding the wet part of your housecoat away from the rear part of your body, you stumble back to the kitchen . . . only to find that you have turned on the wrong burner? And while this has warmed the kitchen up nicely, it has failed to do anything about heating water?

And you don't realize that the water is cold until AFTER you add sugar and milk and stir it. Then you stand for some time watching the undissolving coffee granules do a graceful waltz on the surface of the milk-colored liquid until they glue themselves to the sides of the cup.

"Oh God!" you groan, as you empty the cup in the sink and rinse it, fighting the nearly overwhelming urge to go back to bed and start over. "Is this going to be one of "those" days?"

God doesn't answer you audibly, but it soon becomes apparent that His answer is in the affirmative? You know this when one of the eggs you are trying to put on to boil slips from your hands and lands with a disgustingly liquid splat on the wayward slipper you found in the bathtub.

Grinning insanely, you deliberately leave the offending slipper-still adorned with a yucky egg-yolk flower-in the kitchen sink, hobble-hop back to the bedroom and rip the offending sheet from the bed and throw it, along with your remaining slipper and the damp housecoat, in the middle of the floor.

As you climb back into bed and pull the pillow over your head, you mutter, "This is one of THOSE days! I'll just sleep through it, that's what I'll do . . . ." And you do . . . until the doorbell rings five minutes later.

That, dear Linda, is why your letter was so welcome. You never have THOSE days, do you?

Do you?

Regards to all,

Adelle