Some Much Needed Good Luck

They say if you've got your health you've got everything.

As of late, it hasn't felt that way.

There was my seaweed-soaked "vacation" in Mexico.
The setbacks and mishaps of publishing a book.
The noisy neighborhood canine adventures.
The departure of both my college girls.
And a string of freelance gigs that failed to materialize at the last second.

First world problems if ever there were any, but stressful nevertheless.

Happily, the tide seems to have turned.

We have adjusted to our new lives as empty nesters.
I didn't embarrass myself with the book, though it appears publishing is not the most direct route to financial gain.
And work, in the form of many assignments, is coming in from all directions.

Of course there can be no better indication that Lady Luck has come to pay a visit to Culver City than the events of last week.

You see because we are busy, and lazy, we, like many Southern Californians, have a cleaning lady. She comes twice a month to clean and do the stuff we don't want to. I want to say she is Mexican but I think she might be from Guatamala.

Either way, contrary to what Donald Trump might think, we don't need less of these people in our country, we need more.

She is soft spoken, friendly, law abiding and works harder than any human being alive. Certainly harder working than any of the orange or blue-vested cretins you'll find roaming the aisles at Home Depot or Best Buy.

Last week our cleaning lady called to tell us she would not be able to make her appointment as she needed to take care of her mother, a woman who must be in her 80's. Instead, she asked if her daughter, a part time student putting herself through college, could fill in and earn a little extra money.

Not a problem, we said.

Her daughter, a fluent English speaking woman in her late twenties showed up and didn't leave the house for 6 & 1/2 hours. She scrubbed. She scoured. She cleaned. She found areas of the house I didn't even know we had.

When I emerged from my office after writing some banner ads, I discovered she had ripped the entire refrigerator apart. She tore through that 26 cubic foot appliance like a White Tornado, more accurately, a Brown Tornado. At one point she asked me for a Phillips Head screwdriver so she could remove the Kenmore label and clean behind it.

As she was walking out the door, she asked if it would be alright to sub for her mom in another two weeks. The selfish part of me wants her to keep coming back. Forever. She'll have this house cleaner than Cedar Sinai Hospital. Of course, I know my luck and when it's good it never lasts too long.

Oh shit, I found a flea on the dog.

Correction, fleas.