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Life is back to normal after my little spell o' angst and to celebrate, two of the people in my life have blessed me with fabulous moments that I get to tease them about for years.

About a month ago my dad got sick. Nobody seemed to be able to figure out what was wrong with him, but he kept having dizzy spells that were strong enough to make him lose his balance. He even fell out of bed once, maybe twice. Since he has a history of heart and blood pressure problems, everyone took this pretty seriously. He had a trip to the emergency room, along with visits with several doctors. The best diagnosis anyone could come up with was that he had a virus that was affecting the fluid in his ears.

He got a little better, but recently the dizziness has returned. On Friday he went back to his regular doctor to see what was wrong.

"Looks like you've got a bug in there," the doctor said as he probed into Dad's ear canal.

"You mean, like, another virus?" my mom asked.

"No. I mean, a bug."

My parents are not squalid people. They bathe. They have more-the-average visits with health care professionals. And yet somehow, my dad managed to get a bug - as in an insect - lodged in his ear, where it ceased living and has been throwing his equillibrium out of whack.

"How in the world did he not know there was a bug in his ear?" I asked my mom. "You'd think he would have dislodged it at some point, since he's always digging around in there with his truck key."

"That's probably how it died," she said.

Later that same day ...

B. and Clara Jane spend lots of time at the neighborhood library. 1) We like free books, and 2) it's a convenient place for them to go when I start hollering that they need to remove themselves from my hair, pronto. Since we've always got a steady stream of borrowed materials coming in and out of the house, we keep a bag hanging by the door. We keep all of our library cards in it and, when something's ready to be returned, we just toss it in the bag. Whoever goes to the library returns the whole bag, and usually comes home with the bag refilled with goodies. It's a lovely system.

Last Thursday night, I requested that B. and Clara Jane remove themselves from my hair, pronto, and that they not come back unless they had carryout Thai food with them. So they went to the library for a bit, then got dinner.

Fast-forward to Saturday afternoon. B. told me that he's been looking everywhere since Friday for the library bag, which contained two DVDs he checked out on Thursday. He'd torn the house apart and it was gone. It certainly wasn't in its designated spot by the front door. I hadn't seen it, either. So he called the library to see if maybe he left the bag there. He hadn't.

After another hour of searcing he was about to make himself crazy. He decided to make a trip back to the Thai restaurant to see if maybe it fell out of the truck when he was getting dinner two nights earlier. I told him to bring me back a big bowl of their Special Beef Soup, since I have a head cold and was more concerned with the state of my mucous membranes than the state of our borrowed library materials (librarian friends who are reading, feel free to cast a dirty look my way ... now.).

So he ran to the Thai place and got my soup. He also found out that no, he hadn't left the bag. He came home, completely frustrated and crabby, stalking around the kitchen, throwing his hands around and saying things like, "It couldn't have just vanished!" and "What the hell? Really. What the hell?". I ate soup.

During one of his stomping sweeps through the kitchen, he brushed against the basement door - you know, the door he used to leave the house when he went to the Thai restaurant, not to mention the door he uses roughly 27 times a day. Something brushed against his leg...

Motherfucking library bag had been hanging on the basement doorknob IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAMN KITCHEN the entire time.

But at least I got soup out of the whole shebang. And it was good.