Aerobics? Who Needs It?

So, I'm in the shower yesterday morning, getting ready for work, lamenting the fact that I can never get up early enough to do anything other than get ready for work. It's also kind of tough when you throw two teenagers into the mix - then you have to get up extra early if you want to have shower time prior to them leaving the house. I always have these pipe dreams of getting up, taking an invigorating early morning walk and then strolling into work freshly showered and glowing with good health, as opposed to the usual freshly showered but dragging my butt and mainlining coffee. I tried not to get too down about it because, after all, it was shaping up to be a beautiful day and I figured I could go for a nice walk in the evening or something like that.

I grabbed my loofa and started to sqeeze some Ocean Spray shower gel (not cranberry juice)onto it and began to ponder the name - "Ocean Spray". I sniffed it. It didn't really smell like ocean spray to me. It smelled more like Cosmetic Department. Maybe even Air Freshener Department, but definitely not Ocean Spray.

This caused me to ponder the descriptive names that various items are tagged with, particularly in the home paint industry. I mean, I've seen shades of green such as "Promised Land" and "Eternal Bliss", shades of brown such as "Discovery" and "Wheeling", and even shades of white by the likes of "Bubble Bath" and "Sweet Truffle". I think this is very clever marketing. Who wouldn't want to lay (lie?) in bed, surrounded by Eternal Bliss, gazing upward to a vast expanse of Sweet Truffle? How do I get this job of naming paint? In all fairness, I have to admit, my names would probably fall a little more to the practical side. For example...

Hello, miss. Oh, you're looking to paint the large, cast iron radiators in your home? Ok. Do you have cats? You do? Oh, then might I suggest this enamel base paint in a shade of Meow-Mix Vomit? It's perfect for hiding those clumps that fall down between the fins. You know, the ones you can never seem to locate until they are dried to a hardened crust that would require a jack hammer to remove. You'll take three gallons? Great.

Whilst pondering these things, something, I don't know what, caused me to take a closer look at my loofa. There was a wasp in my loofa. A freaking WASP in my LOOFA! What the crap?! My first instinct was to panic-and-flail-my-arms-about-slip-and-fall-and-break-a major-bone-in-my-leg but I resisted the urge. Instead I gave the loofa a little shake and the bewildered wasp began flying about in the shower, probably wondering "How did I wind up in the tropics and, my, isn't the sky a brilliant shade of Serenity this morning!" Normally, wasps don't trouble me. However, I was now trapped in the shower with one, my bare, white butt a glowing target. I began to submit to my earlier instinct of flailing about.

Oddly enough, it was at this very moment that my shower curtain reached that point in species evolution where it crossed the line from being "inanimate object" to "carnivor". It attacked. For several minutes, I danced the ancient dance of woman, wasp and curtain until, finally, the wasp flew up and out of the shower and the curtain slipped back over that precarious edge into its previouse state of lifelessness.

Whew! What a workout. Maybe I could skip the evening walk after all.

So, there you have it, my dear readers. If you don't have time for exercise - or if you just want to spice up your life a little bit - just put a little wasp in your loofa and flail those pounds away!