Hello? Is it me you're looking for?

Apologies for the Lionel Ritchie reference...

Okay, so we are on Day Five of no school for Viva (Day Seven if you count last weekend), and she is really out of control. I brought her socks and shoes and jacket out so we could run to the bank and the store and she threw a fit. "I don't want to leave the house!" she screamed.

Oh. But if we don't leave the house, I am going to have to kill you, so which will it be?

Honestly, she has gotten to the point that she was having a tantrum every twenty minutes if she wasn't either (a) watching TV, (b) playing computer games on pbskids.org, or (c) drawing with her brand-new Crayola Twistables (which, I am sad to report, do not appear to be fully washable when someone accidentally colors out of the lines and on to the carpet. A pox on Crayola, I say!)

We are clearly on each other's last damn nerve. About 45 minutes ago, I took her to her room, sat her down with a sippy cup dosed with Children's Tylenol Cold & Flu, and told her if she wasn't going to take a nap, she'd have to at least conform to Blah Blah house rules and stay in her room for an hour or so of quiet time. She beamed. I'm serious.

She must have been thrilled to get away from me. What can I say?

And now I am watching a spider way way up at the crease of the seam where the wall and ceiling join, and it has been running in my direction for a few minutes now, and it got directly above me and apparently saw me looking at it, and it stopped.

All you Charlotte's Web fans out there can stop reading now.

I am sitting here with a Time magazine with Dr. Andrew Weil on the cover, rolled and ready for action. I think you know what I'm saying.

And as we draw close to the one-hour mark, Viva has started wailing from her room like she has just witnessed all her Teletubbies meeting with a very grim end. Just to be clear, she does have all four talking Teletubby dolls -- a gift from her grandmother. During this week of enforced captivity, I have given all four of them makeovers with those sticky foam cutouts you get at craft stores. Tinky-Winky and Dipsy look scary bad-ass with their new crazy foam eyebrows, is all.

I used to be (or so they say) an interesting person, capable of holding up my end of an intelligent conversation. Now I am sticking colored pieces of foam onto my kid's dolls and watching a spider make a circuit of my bedroom (it is now directly behind me, still up near the ceiling) to entertain myself.

So sad. But you know, since I am on antibiotics, I can't drink liquor.* So I gotta take my kicks where I can find them.

* For those who don't know me very well: I am not a serious drinker. Family history of alcoholism scared me away from that. But what I would not give for a nice cold Modelo right now. Oh, yes.