“Isn’t ‘hiney’ a fun word?”, my trainer asked me this morning as she ordered me to perform infinity reps of hamstring raises, abductor raises, and straight leg raises, all the while exhorting me to “squish” mine.

That really wasn’t what I had in mind when I dreamed about finding other people who share my love of all things “ass”.

Upon picking up his jeans from our bedroom floor my husband remarked, “Someone is apparently sending me a message that they’re glad we’re home. The ‘tail on a stick’ and the rope (2 cat toys) were both lying on my pants.”

My response: “Ooh, it’s just like the wise men bringing gifts to baby Jesus.”

My Grandmother (to my uncle): Do I have all of these figures in the right place?

My Uncle: Um, I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

My husband and just went to the grocery store to buy some dessert. As we were standing in the ice cream aisle, perusing all the choices, we heard the high-pitched sound of a little boy talking to his dad. Neither one of us really paid any attention to it, until we noticed that it wasn’t stopping. So we both looked up at the exact same moment, just in time to hear him yell, “The witch, daddy, the witch!” over and over again. And he was pointing? Directly at me.

A couple of days ago my husband and I were sitting on the couch catching up on this week’s episode of NCIS. The Director of NCIS, played by Lauren Holly, was talking to Special Agent Gibbs, played by Mark Harmon, about a case they were working on involving a man who was engaged to multiple women at the same time. She was talking about how even if you are in a relationship with someone, you may not really know them. They might be keeping secrets from you.

“I don’t have any secrets from you,” I told my husband.

“I know!” he replied. Due to some quirk in my own personal makeup, I can neither lie nor keep secrets. It’s like any kind of secret information is a foreign body in my system, and I must vomit it up and out as soon as possible in order to keep my system running smoothly.

“What about you?” I asked him. “Do you have any secrets?”

“Nope,” he said, and we went back to watching the show.

In the next scene Dr. “Ducky” Mallard is talking to Agent Gibbs about the corpse he is examining. “I got a hunch and I decided to trim his (the corpse’s) nose hair,” said Dr. Mallard.

At this my husband pauses the show (all hail the awesomeness of TIVO!), leaps up off the couch, and says, “Oh yeah, I do have a secret from you.”*

Oh, dear sweet Lord In Heaven, I thought to myself, completely panicked. What the hell kind of secret does “nose hair” remind you of?!

“Um, that’s okay, dude,” I said, backing away from him. “You can just go ahead and keep that particular secret to yourself.”

*It turned out all right, though. For some reason I still don’t completely understand, that just reminded him that he’d brought me back a present from Mexico.

Buying myself a new pair of jeans before I realized that “flare” is the new millenium’s Code Word for “bell bottoms”.

So when this day started off, I was feeling really good.

I was able to put my contacts in almost on the first try (although I did briefly revert to being 8 years old again when I had to ask my husband to please, please, STOP LOOKING AT ME while I did it.) So I was feeling good about that.

And then once they were in I went to work out, and I was feeling really good about that, because this will be my tenth week in a row of regular exercise.

But apparently that was just too much good feeling in one morning for me, because I had only been walking on the treadmill for about ten minutes when I rubbed my eye and accidentally popped my contact out.

Fortunately I did not lose it, but I did then have to figure out what I was going to do. My first instinct was to leave and go back home, which would have been awkward but doable. The place where I work out is not a regular gym, but instead is a by-appointment-only kind of place, which means that everyone knows who you are, and they notice when you come in, and they notice when you leave, and they have no qualms whatsoever about following you out into the parking lot and stopping you from driving away if they think you’ve left too quickly.

But I could deal with that. What was more difficult to deal with was the fact that my trainer arrived at that exact moment to work with another of her clients and I was instantly faced with an even more important dilemma, namely that of preventing her from changing the setting on my treadmill from the level at which I felt I could actually walk and still ensure the delivery of oxygen to my entire body, to the level at which she felt I SHOULD be working out (my level being, “Oh, The Burning!”, and her level being, “Spontaneous Combustion And Death!”)

So I stayed, clutching my contact the whole time, and when I finally escaped to my car I realized that I was so a person who’d had contacts for less than four days. Because, did I have my contact case, or my contact solution, or my glasses, or anything even remotely resembling an eye care product? Um, no. I had…an empty granola bar wrapper plucked hastily from the floor, thus ensuring that when I finally made it back home my contact would resemble nothing so much as a colorless, hideously deformed Shrinky Dink.

And I was left to wonder (yet again) at the fact that somehow I am allowed to be the person in charge of my own self care, and to fear for the other living beings who depend on me.

Unfortunately I was a little too miserable to notice before, what with the sinus pain and pressure, and the White Hot Nail Of Agony piercing my eardrum, and The Doctor Who Did Not Believe Me, but last Monday, June 12th, was the one year birthday of my blog!

I always knew I could produce an almost unending stream of words pretty much on demand, but who knew I could come up with enough actual funny stories to fill up an entire year?

So I just wanted to take a moment to mark this occasion, and to thank all of you who read this blog. Because without you, I would just be jibber jabbering out into nothingness.

Here’s to another great year!

…so that any potential earphone depredations cannot possibly be traced back to her.