Baby I'm A-Want You to Get Down on Your Knees and Look What You've Done to Everything I Own

You know how some days, you wake up and think, "WHAT am I going to write about today?" And then, as the day progresses, you know that problem has been solved, although perhaps not in the way you might have wished? Well, I'm having one of those days.

How do I write thee? Let me count the ways.
I write thee for the depth and bread and hype
My prose can reach, when I begin to type
About events in ordinary days.

Yeah. I kind of have three happenings to share. I'll limit myself to one each day. Let's start with the most mundane. Not that it happens all the time. Perhaps it's just the least interesting to minds other than Val's. It is the BREAD in the depth and hype sandwich of the above plagiarized partial sonnet.

THE CHECK WAS IN THE MAIL!

This afternoon EmBee expelled a little envelope with a return address of which I was not familiar. The Pony, always a postal inspector lest he miss a vital college communique, noted this envelope as well. I ripped it open and found a CHECK! A check for money! Money for ME!

It was my prize money for winning 1st Place in the nonfiction contest at the All Write Now Conference last Saturday.

Let the record show that I have yet to wave this moolah under Hick's nose. Hick. Who picked us up, made a U-turn (legal, of course), heard that The Pony and I were both winners, then harshed our mellow by saying, "Do you ever get any money for this writing stuff?" Yeah. Ebenezer needs to work on his timing.

Let the record show that Even Steven is constantly running in the background of Val's life. Although Hick has not yet been informed of today's windfall of $50, he made a trip to Walmart two hours after it arrived, and bought himself a drill for $43.71, to replace the one he has four chargers for that overheated while he was using it in the 105-degree heat index.

Fifty steps forward, forty-three-point-seventy-one steps back. The soundtrack of Val's life.