Ruralite Cafe: Published 12/07/00

By Lisa Majors-Duff News Editor

All I want for Christmas is more hours in the day

Take Monday night for example. I casually picked up my yellow Advantage legal pad containing notes from three separate meeting and headed down the steps from my office to the street. Walking to my car I began to fantasize about putting Niki to bed at about 8 o'clock, fixing a cup of orange spice tea and sitting down at the keyboard to write a story about Smart Growth or the county commissioners or a Ruralite Cafe, the subject of which was still very much up in the air.

But as I drove to Scotts Creek School, I suddenly remembered why I'd been unconsciously clutching my checkbook all day. Monday was family night at the school book fair. For reasons I cannot begin to remember, I missed the literary season's premiere event last year, a social blunder I promised never again to repeat. In other words, I owed my daughter some books.

Buying and reading books are both highly encouraged activities in our family, and school book fairs are a wonderful place to expose children to the joy of browsing, leafing and thumbing through pages. While the choices to be made at a book fair are by no means easy, they are the kinds of choices I prefer over "What do you want on your pizza?" or "Which shade of body glitter can I have?"

After about 40 minutes of looking at books and talking to other parents just like me ­ trying hopelessly to keep up with their children's cries of "Mom, look at this..." ­ it was time to make our purchases and head home. There remained a glimmer of hope, I thought, that Niki would go to sleep on time, leaving me time to tackle at least one story.

That's when it hit me and my child ­ we were hungry. With Greg out of town, the Duff girls are at liberty to take the easy route to an evening meal. Believe it or not, modern culinary science has made it possible to prepare mac and cheese in about three minutes, depending, of course, on the power of your microwave oven. Peanut butter, unfortunately, still takes exactly the same amount of time to scoop out of the jar and spread on a cracker.

But neither Niki nor I were in the mood for a cheap thrill. We wanted real food with at least a couple of the four food groups represented. Luckily, I had my choice of chicken, pork or beef (well, hamburger) in the freezer and an impressive collection of cookbooks on the shelf. In less than an hour, which was getting mighty close to that 8 o'clock lights-out goal, we were eating oven-roasted pork chops with seasoned bread stuffing and buttery green peas. We managed to squeeze in the final food group by having milk and cookies for dessert.

The next part of the story gets a little confusing. At some point during dinner, I decided that instead of hiding the Christmas present we'd bought Greg at the book fair, Niki and I would wrap it and have it under the tree by the time he returned from his business trip. After six Christmases in my home, I've discovered the best place to hide presents is in the trunk of my car. (Now that that secret's out, I don't know what I'll do.)

Finding the wrapping paper, ribbon, bows and tape turned out to be easy, but I spent an extra half an hour looking for the tags, which are vital if you wrap this early in December. It's embarrassing when you have to let the dog open a gift because you can't remember who it's for. You can't allow just anyone to unwrap an untagged gift. Grandma Duff, who lives in Arizona and is not athletically inclined, would not care in the slightest that "it's the thought that counts" if she were to open a box of golf balls or new pair of long-johns.

By the time we'd finished wrapping, 8 o'clock was long gone and my bedtime was fast approaching. We still had teeth to brush and new book fair books to read. Score: Life-1, working at home-0.

It's easy to say, as I sit here at my home computer, that life should win every time, not just 8 out of 10 times. But I also know that I'll continue to bring work home in a misguided attempt to get more done so I have more time for other things. As a credit-card-carrying member of the "More Generation," I understand the need to seek out book fairs of all sorts, expand my culinary horizons and teach my daughter that it is better to give than to receive, it's finding the time that continues to trip me up.

So I have a simple request: Can modern science or Santa Claus work on adding a few more hours to the day for the new millennium?

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