As part of my morning ritual, I pick out the clothes I'm going to wear for the day, bring most of it into the bathroom to change into after my shower, and I throw a pair of clean socks to the bottom of the stairs. I've gotten into the habit of sitting on the landing, three steps from the bottom where it turns a corner into the living room, to put on my shoes and socks.
I also have the bad habit of leaving things in the corner of that landing when I'm too lazy to bring them upstairs. Right now there are a couple of bills, a small box of CDs, a book and a bottle of shampoo waiting to be brought up. The theory is that one of the times I need to go upstairs, I'll take that stuff up and put it away. Objects sitting there in the walkway serve as a reminder that they need to go up. And there is a good reason to go up several times a day, because the bathroom is upstairs.
I don't put that theory into practice often enough, because I'm pretty sure the CDs and the book have been there two weeks or more. When it comes time to do bills, I usually go down and pick up the stragglers sitting in that corner. Actually I'm going to fetch them right now while I'm thinking about it...
There. I feel better now. Don't you?
Another foolish habit I've gotten into is taking off my dirty socks in the living room and tossing them in that corner of the stairway landing, with all the other things that will theoretically go upstairs.
So today when I put on my socks at the bottom of the stairs, I noticed they were inside out. Melinda has gotten me trained to put them right-side out before putting them in the dirty laundry, and even if I had left them inside out, she probably would have turned them the right way before putting the laundry away. (Not that I'm a stickler for this kind of crap. I don't care about WIRE HANGERS either.)
I thought nothing of it, went to work, worked diligently as always, came home with groceries, put stuff away, put Melinda's double cheeseburger in the fridge because she had already gone to bed, and carried my veggieburger and fries upstairs to use the interwebs. Near the bottom of the stairway, wedged in between the stair rail and the wall, was the clean pair of socks I had thrown down this morning. I like to slide pairs of socks down that rail to see if they'll go all the way to the bottom or if they'll fall off the rail partway down. I had forgotten about them getting wedged in the rail today. The ones I put on this morning were dirty socks left on the stairs from the night before.
Sorry. That's not much of a payoff.
And then an anaconda bit me and shrieked, "That's what you get for leaving dirty socks at the bottom of the stairs, jerkwad!"
The End.
(2005)
