Choices...

So I just returned from a trip to the US. I had a wonderful time with my family and friends. It was great…too short but wonderful. And now I’m exhausted. Even before I left, my last day there in the States, I was knackered. I couldn’t figure out why…I mean except for the obvious - that I usually spend all day every day alone on the side of a mountain knitting and I had just spent 10 days seeing and doing and talking and eating and taking advantage of being with people and in places that I see only once a year. Anyway, I was taking a shower at my sister’s house…my last shower when it hit. It hit me why I was so exhausted…it hit me on my head and on my back and on my butt.

You see, my sister and her husband just built a new house…a really big, beautiful, modern house with all those technological things that now stymie me…like central heating, on demand hot water, an inside electric clothes dryer. Beyond these things there were also a bunch of things that I didn’t even understand like really large flat screen tvs with “tvo” (in addition to 1,000,000 channels), and light switches that look like remote controls inserted into the walls where a normal switch would be (I won’t even ask Jeeves how those things work!). They also have a shower in their house that, besides being as big as my whole bathroom, has so many dials and knobs and things that spray that, well, I got confused. This is when I realized why I was so exhausted.

Laurie: “That knob there controls the temperature. That one turns on the top showerhead. This one, the hand held nozzle, and that last knob controls the back and butt spray. You can do any or all of them at once. You decide.”

You decide - here in lies the problem.

I’m a terribly indecisive woman. It’s terrible. I once went to buy a wedding card for a friend of mine with my mom and she almost wet her pants because it took me so long to pick a card. There were just too many choices.

My entire trip in the US was just one choice after another. Restaurants involve menus that can be 4 or 5 pages long. Cafes have 769 ways to make a coffee. Grocery stores have entire aisles devoted only to beverages…and they don’t even sell alcohol. At Walgreens, Walmart and Sam’s Club - well, forget about it!

I had some really nice photos to support this post but there were so many choices on the digital camera that my mom gave me, well, I made a bad choice and ended up deleting them all.