Seeing Red (Patty)

I have definitely been experiencing the hemorrhaging, and a little more time between occurrences….This was my most recent secret drama (Party of One? Oh, right over here for your monthly unpredictable event that no one will ever hear about…)
When we were in Europe, I was getting smug, like “Oh yeah! Old age ROCKS! It is so cool NOT to get your period while on vacation. Ha, HA! But then (cue the Jaws soundtrack…) the night before we left, I was walking around Vienna, and I got some “pre” signs that it was on it’s way. You know how you are about to have a picnic and you see ominous clouds and a flash of lightning in the distance but still you hope and sort of believe it’s not going to rain?
My most-excellent plan was to ignore it in the hopes that it would go away. The following morning was one of those crazy travel days, where our wake-up call was at 430AM for a 630 flight. I packed a good amount of supplies in my carry-on, and semi-ignored that situation. We took a short flight to Amsterdam, and right when we were landing, the dam broke and The Event was underway. But we had to go through customs, and we made our connecting flight by the skin of our teeth, in fact if it hadn’t left a few minutes late, we would have missed that 10 and a half hour flight to Houston….I was in a movie coma, and about 2 hours into the flight, right after Last Chance Harvey but before Ratatouille, all my supplies were gone, no match for the torrent that is my “peri” stage. Even the flight attendant commented “Wow! You have so much energy!” Which is airlinespeak for “Wow! You like to be in my way in the aisles a lot!” In the end, after using maybe 10,000 Continental paper towels, and several more movies, the plane, (thank you, Jesus!) was landing in Houston…I run/waddle to the gift shop, where they have everything a person could want, Slim Jims, eyeglass repair packets, ashtrays, Texas-shaped potato-chip bowls, leaf-rubbing kits for kids, 72 varieties of gum, condoms…but they DON’T stock feminine hygiene supplies…what the F?!!?!? This emotional rollercoaster is all under the veil of secrecy, somewhere in there I had completely changed outfits, but for whatever reason, husbands are wired not to notice that sort of thing and it’s probably all for the best, they don’t want to end up with TMI, something I have just provided you with I’m afraid…
My hand hurts today, I went to a pool party last night that was “Tankini Mandatory” and I volunteered to bring my awesome juicer and 100 limes for skini Martinis, but after lugging this cumbersome appliance to the party, I realized that I’d left a piece of the juicer (and apparently a piece of my brain) on the counter at home, and it was too far to go back and get it…the host had a manual, pitiful excuse-for-a-juicer, and I felt obligated to juice a gazillion limes…
And completely unrelated, but always fun are Summer Events in New Orleans…Last weekend was White Linen night, all the art galleries are open and the streets are pedestrian-only... maybe 25,000 attend this event and everyone wears white, it’s a great people watching event, you see lots of women in interesting hats, drinking wine, it’s quite lovely… like Mardi Gras without the drunks…
They follow that the next weekend with a lower-brow event called Dirty Linen night, which takes place in the French Quarter and is kicked-off by the Red Dress Race. It’s not cheap, I think it’s 50 bucks to participate in this running/drinking event, but that didn’t stop over 6,000 people from signing up, thus all day yesterday, from the coffee shops to bookstores, wherever you went you saw men and women in lovely red dresses…gotta do something to beat the heat!!

Patty