Temptation

These are hard times for people like me, who are easily tempted. I try to stay on my diet, but with all the food commercials, I find myself in a TV smorgasbord of chocolate cakes, Quarter Pounders, and vanilla ice cream. And the only way I can avoid temptation is not to buy forbidden food because if a chocolate cake finds its way into my house, I cannot resist it. I will eat my way through it. Which brings me to the point: Illicit s.e.x.

You may be wondering about the connection, and here it is. I was listening to the radio the other day and heard an ad for a certain website. The company slogan was, "When monogamy becomes monotony," and the pitch, delivered in a seductive female voice, was that if you're married and bored out of your mind, you're definitely ent.i.tled to an affair. Just log on.

I thought it must be a joke, or maybe I was hearing things, which was undoubtedly true, as Brad Pitt often whispers my name, in my mind.

But the next night I was watching TV and a commercial for a similar website came on. It featured a pretty girl in a negligee that women haven't worn since the days of Mamie Van Doren. The gist of her pitch was, "Married men, log on. Cheat your cheating heart out. We're cheating, too, so we won't tell." The gist of her pitch was, "Married men, log on. Cheat your cheating heart out. We're cheating, too, so we won't tell."

Whoa.

I thought, this is chocolate cake of the highest order. A website for cheaters. Can human beings resist such temptation? This is like a pint of Haagen-Dasz vanilla jumping into your shopping cart, mugging you to be bought, and then spooning itself down your gullet.

This is waterboarding, with saturated fats.

In the good old days, to have an affair, you had to meet another married person at work, then court them, but that wasted a lot of precious negligee time.

Those days are over. Technology has made life easier for married people with a roving eye and a fired-up laptop.

Whoopee?

I went instantly to my computer and logged onto the website, to report to you. As we all know by now, I have n.o.body to cheat on except a corgi. And I would never date a married man, especially one who's attracted to a screen name like easy-s.e.xygurl.

I'm more like annoyinginterruptingurl.

On the website, the company reported that it was established in 2001 and had 1.8 million members, 8986 of whom were "online now!" I made a mental note that 2001 was the year the world went to h.e.l.l in a handbasket and that almost 9000 people want even their cheating to be time-efficient. I bet their Black-Berrys are always on, too, and they keep them in their pants.

Their BlackBerrys, that is.

So I signed on to the service, as an Attached Female Seeking Attached Males, using an old email and fake info. I made myself age 22 and "slim" because I thought it would work better than age 52 and "can't resist chocolate cake."

Then the website gave me a choice of "Limits." Surprisingly, None was not an option. Neither was: Can't Keep My Word. Or: Thinks Integrity Makes Sense, In Theory. And not even: In Sickness And In Health, But Let's Not Get Fanatical.

Instead, the categories offered were: Something Short Term, Something Long Term, Cyber Affairs/Erotic Chat, Whatever Excites Me, Anything Goes, and Undecided.

I chose Anything Goes. Yee-hah! In truth, I was Undecided, but that sounded like a primary voter and wouldn't project Mamie Van Doren to an Attached Male.

The next page looked like the math section of the SATs, with bar graphs showing the peak usage of the website. As you can guess, the bars showed the heaviest usage Monday through Friday, from 9 to 5. So all of this cheating was going on at the office, which made sense. Why meet in the stockroom when you can meet in the chat room? Especially if you're an Anything Goes kind of gal. At least the website would decrease cheating within the same company and distribute it among all companies, thus equalizing the market share of cheaters. n.o.body wants a single business getting a cheating monopoly.

I bet Microsoft would be all over that. They hog everything.

The final page gave lots of good tips, like "Don't exaggerate your s.e.xual abilities."

Impossible.

There was even a warning: "We have a strict policy against escorts plying their craft." Funny, I never thought of an escort as having a craft. Stonemasons have a craft. Escorts have diseases.

I clicked on the last page, which offered a book about erotic fantasies by author Sharon Sharalike. I wondered if that was her real name.

I read a little while longer, then checked my email to my fake profile. In only five minutes, I had already gotten two emails, both from Attached Males, age 47 and 51, respectively. By the way, remember I'm 22. In my dreams. And theirs.

The first Attached Male liked candles, and the second had an "insatiable s.e.x drive." Both described themselves as "fit." And both wanted Something Long Term.

Something Long Term?

Isn't that marriage?

I wonder what their wives wanted.

Kids Say The Darndest

I'm a fan of shortcuts. Not in my job, but in everything else, to make more time for my job. Daughter Francesca calls me Sally Shortcut, but it only makes me swell with pride. I don't know who raised that child.

Most of the time, I get away with taking a shortcut. This morning, however, my shortcut required the calling of squad cars, the stopping of traffic on a major road, and me running for five miles with a bucket of carrots.

Let me explain.

Remember Buddy, My Little Pony? He's a brown-and-white paint, and I ride him for fun. Actually, I walk him for fun. He's twenty-five years old and he goes no faster than a herky-jerky stutter-step. He's the Walter Brennan of ponies.

In fact, I doubted that Buddy still had a gallop in him, until this morning. When he morphed into Secretariat.

I ride with a group of other women, which means we sit on our b.u.t.ts and yap while the horses do all the work. Buddy is the oldest, smallest, and fattest of all the horses, usually the Steady Eddie on our trail rides, which go around cornfields and through woods, ending when we're tired of yammering.

I mean, exercising.

You may recall that I take shortcuts clipping Buddy, which he accepts with the grudging resignation of Eeyore. I had clipped him before the winter, and when the first nice day of spring arrived, I decided to go for a ride. I slipped off his blanket, but to my dismay, Buddy had returned to his mastodon self. I had no time to clip him, and I thought, I can take a shortcut. accepts with the grudging resignation of Eeyore. I had clipped him before the winter, and when the first nice day of spring arrived, I decided to go for a ride. I slipped off his blanket, but to my dismay, Buddy had returned to his mastodon self. I had no time to clip him, and I thought, I can take a shortcut.

I headed out for a ride with friend Paula, who has a gentle giant Percheron named Dave. Dave and Buddy are paints with the same coloring, like Mutt and Jeff, only horses. By the way, I hope you're following my references. Young or sane people may have to use Google.

So Paula and I were on horseback, walking along in the sunshine, chatting away, when I noticed that Buddy was shaking his head more than usual. As furry as he was, he looked like one of those automatic shoeshine brushes they have in hotels.

"I guess he's a little itchy," I said. "I didn't have time to clip him."

"He looks cute, all furry," Paula said, which is only one of the many things I like about her. But in the next minute, her eyes widened and she shouted, "Watch out, he's gonna roll!"

And before I knew what was happening, Buddy was sinking onto his knees and rolling onto the gra.s.s to scratch his back. The only problem was, I was still in the saddle.

Now I'm no horsewoman, as you're about to find out, because I didn't even realize what was happening until Paula told me and I remembered some faint instruction that you should never stay on the back of a rolling horse, unless you like the sensation of 1500 pounds landing on your pelvis, knee, and ankle. In other words, I jumped off like a crazy person and let out a scream. It freaked Buddy out, and he looked back, showing the whites of his eyes and so terrified that he leapt up and galloped away. He tore across the cornfield, and in no time, became a fuzzy black dot, like a period with hair.

I couldn't believe it. I blinked and blinked. Paula and Dave blinked and blinked. And then I had to do something because Buddy was galloping toward the busiest street in the neighborhood. Either he would dent a truck or a truck would dent him. So I started screaming and running and calling 911 all at once.

"Your emergency please?" the dispatcher asked, and I kept running through the cornfield, screaming for Buddy and telling the story, like this: "I always take shortcuts but maybe it isn't such a good idea all the time!"

"Pardon?"

Amazingly enough, five minutes later there were three police cars blocking traffic, five armed cops, Paula, Dave, and six volunteers from a nearby horse farm, who brought a plastic bucket of carrots, intended to entice runaway ponies. We chased Buddy everywhere, and he ignored us, tearing all over the cornfield in curlicues and loop-the-loops, until I was pretty sure that he was spelling something or making crop circles.

We chased him until we were exhausted and he finally trapped himself behind a fence, just short of the road and certain death.

And so it ended happily, thanks to Paula, Dave, Good Samaritans, and the local constabulary.

Except for one thing: daughter Francesca was right.

Again.

The Fixer

You may remember that I'm in Home Improvement Frenzy. Aluminum siding is coming off, cedar shakes are going on. Working at my house today are stonemasons, roofers, and carpenters, but none of them is single.

It gets worse.

Yesterday morning after it rained hard, a stonemason hurried in to tell me that my levee was broken. He was upset. So was I. I didn't know I had a levee. I didn't even know what a levee was. All I knew about levees was that somebody drove his Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry.

"How bad is a broken levee?" I asked.

"Very bad." He told me that when my levee broke, my springhouse got flooded, and because I have a well, that probably meant I had no running water.

"Really?" I crossed to the faucet and turned it on, but only a tiny stream of water came out. "Uh oh."

"You need an excavator."

You can imagine how this news delighted me. I was already fixing everything that could be fixed on the house, and I had been so worried that I would be limited in the amount of money I could spend on home repair. I didn't realize that I could spend money fixing the ground, too.

Yay!

My ground was broken, and suddenly the possibilities were limitless. I could spend and spend and spend, especially if the next thing to break was the sky. I could hire carpenters to build a wooden frame and support heaven itself. And after I had repaired the earth and the sky, I could move on to the sea.

I hear the tides need holding back.

So, to come back to the point, I learned that a levee is a mound of dirt that holds water in a channel, to control the runoff. If you live in the suburbs, you know about runoff. Runoff belongs with words like aggravated a.s.sault aggravated a.s.sault and and tax increase. tax increase. Runoff can make even sane citizens take up clubs, and if you start a conversation with a suburban type on the subject, be ready to settle in for the duration. Ranting will be involved, fists shaken, and development decried. Also revenuers, then gov'mint in general. Runoff can make even sane citizens take up clubs, and if you start a conversation with a suburban type on the subject, be ready to settle in for the duration. Ranting will be involved, fists shaken, and development decried. Also revenuers, then gov'mint in general.

I had to get my runoff under control, and fast. One of my contractors knew a guy who knew an excavator, so the excavator came and gave me an estimate to repair the levee. It would cost $10,000.

Ouchie.

I gazed at my broken levee, wondering if I could get a shovel and do it myself. As far as I could tell, a side of a hill had washed away and the dirt had to be dug out and piled back up again. It wasn't rocket science. I could make a gutter, like in a bowling alley. Or like the moat around a sandcastle, at the beach. I mean, how hard could it be?

But a.s.sistant Laura reminded me that I have a job and told me to get another estimate.

"Do I have to?" I asked her.

"Of course."

Now here's another thing. I don't usually get a lot of estimates. I don't have time, and basically, I trust people. I know that labor costs money and so do materials. Everybody's ent.i.tled to make a living, and I have found that people are fair and honest. estimates. I don't have time, and basically, I trust people. I know that labor costs money and so do materials. Everybody's ent.i.tled to make a living, and I have found that people are fair and honest.

"Get real," Laura said, so I listened to her, as I do in all things. I called a second excavator, who came over and gave me a second estimate. His cost?

$1000.

To review: two excavators, one estimate at $10,000 and one at $1000. For the same job.

You can imagine how delighted I was to hear this news, which showed me another way to spend even more and more and more money. As much as I was spending to fix my house, I could be spending ten times as much with no extra effort. All I had to do was hire the right contractors.

I called Laura and told her. "Can you believe it?"

"Yes."

"Now what do I do?"

"Get another estimate. You need three."

"Yes, master."

I hung, up, excited. Maybe I could get an estimate for $100,000. I wanted a top quality levee. A prestige levee. One that you'd need a Mercedes to drive to. And it would never, ever run dry.

So I went online looking for a third excavator, letting my imagination run free. Outside my window, I noticed that the clouds were looking a little gray. Dingy. They needed a fresh coat of white paint. The cost would be in the prep. Power-washing, burning, caulking, priming. It would cost a fortune to paint the clouds.

I'm on it, people.

Mona Lucy Smile

I just lived an episode of Emergency Vet Emergency Vet. Tune in.

The star is Lucy, my old golden retriever, who is still rockin' after thirteen years. Her eyes, brown as bittersweet chocolate, remain bright, though her step has slowed and she scuffs around on dust-mop paws. Her fur, which used to be a thick russet color, never grew back after a shave last summer, so her coat sprouts in crazy patches, like onion gra.s.s.

Lucy's a Bad Hair Dog.

Our story opens when I notice that Lucy has a wound on her chest. It's hidden by matted chest hair, and it's yucky, a medical term you may know.

So I take her to our vet who biopsies the yuckiness and it turns out to be skin cancer, though an X-ray shows that it hasn't spread. This qualifies as good news, except that during the week after the yuckiness, Lucy ages in fast-forward. She walks so slowly she's almost in reverse and sleeps so deeply I hold my breath until I see hers. By Wednesday, I worry that this is The End. By Friday, Lucy cannot stand up without help, and I take her to the vet.

I'm sure this is The End.

But my vet is the greatest in the world, and he thinks it may be a spinal degenerative condition. He puts her on steroids and tells me to worry only if there's a downturn. He thinks it's not The End, and I love him for that. I believe him until the next morning, when Lucy's front legs fail, too. tells me to worry only if there's a downturn. He thinks it's not The End, and I love him for that. I believe him until the next morning, when Lucy's front legs fail, too.