Get the picture? … by Sherry Hopkins

“I’m staying up all night long tonight,” Dear Don declared last Saturday. Actually, he makes that announcement every Saturday afternoon.

“I’m going to have a movie marathon,” he said.

By 8 p.m. Dear sweet Don is snoring. His movie marathon playing out in his dreams.

I’m no better. We have a wealth of movie DVDs from which to choose and a DVR list a mile long. But it seems that the lull of a comfortable bed and a soft pillow trumps even the best of movies. I would venture to say we have seen the first fifteen minutes of a thousand movies and then it’s shuteye for us both.

The following day if we attempt to watch the same movie, Dear Don always needs to rewind to the beginning because in his drifting off period he has forgotten what it was we were watching exactly. So we put the movie on, watch fifteen minutes, fall asleep and the next day start over with the same results. It is like the movie Groundhog Day where the main character keeps reliving the same day of his life with the same results.

This is a very deep rut filled with quicksand from which we will likely never escape.

Unless the two of us ever suffer from insomnia and not narcolepsy we will never see the middle or end of a movie.

On the bright side we will always have something we have never seen to watch.

A few weeks ago I complained because Dear Don had become addicted to shredded cheddar cheese. He was at the time eating a bit more than 5 pounds of the stuff a week. Well, just as I predicted Mother Nature intervened and he reluctantly put the cheese down, much to my relief.

But of course there had to be a substitute so he started on saltine crackers. At first he was only eating a sleeve a day. Crackers, as you would imagine, are a lot cheaper than cheese so I didn’t complain. Then the salt from the crackers started to irritate his mouth so he asked for salt free (?) saltines. I located crackers with no salt on top and away he went. As of last week he was up to a sleeve and a half, sometimes two sleeves a day.

So Monday he declared he is off the crackers because they seem to be “upsetting the system” so to speak.

In between those food obsessions he has also become addicted to burned bread. Burned, black whole wheat bread. It looks disgusting and smells even worse. Each morning while watching the news we have to turn the volume level up really high to overcome the loud CRUNCHING sounds coming from this man.

I don’t know what a girl is supposed to do.

I’m hoping that, like the cheese and crackers, this too shall pass. And soon I hope, that burned bread smell is driving me bananas.

As I close Dear Don is finishing off a whole bag of vanilla wafers. A whole bag! I’m going to run and hide the last bag before this becomes obsession number four.

This is getting ridiculous.

You get the picture.

(Contact award-winning columnist Sherry Hopkins at swhcsc@wildblue.net.)