Throwback Thursday: Annamaniacs - While I Am Sleeping Part 2

The day of going back in time to when I had a column. This column was written in 2005.

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Last week I told you the story of the Shoemaker and the Elves because I was leading up to what I was going to write about, but I ran out of time or space or whatever they call it in the column writing biz and I had to not finish it.

So for those of you who missed it, in short:

Shoemaker can’t finish shoes.

While he sleeps naked elves come and finish making shoes.

He gets rich.

They discover naked elves, wife makes clothes.

Elves happy with clothes and never come back.

I guess I could have just written that in the first place. So here’s the second of part of “While I Am Sleeping.”

While I am sleeping, elves enter my home and steal single socks, hide my keys and put dishes in my sink, both clean and dirty dishes, which make the clean dishes dirty.

They overload the garbage, make the cordless phone disappear, and take all the batteries out of the remote controls that I can find. Of course there are the remote controls that I can’t find.

Elves play on my computer and store files in odd places, change my desktop, download weird programs, and put in sneaky little viruses and worms that confound my virus scan. They especially like the triple xxx viruses. They also make quadruple copies of spam email. They empty the ink from my printer, hide all the 100 pens that I keep on my desk and rearrange all my papers.

In my bathroom, they go into my linen closet and throw sheets on the floor, soak towels in the bathtub, make toilet paper streamers, put toothpaste on the mirrors, unwrap and wet down several bars of soap and take all the papers off of the band-aids.

In my fridge, they loosen salad dressing lids, knock over ketchup bottles and jump up and down on them, hide my leftovers so that I can’t find them until my nose does and they add chemicals to my vegetables to make them rot faster than they normally would.

While I am sleeping, in my room they mix my clean clothes with my dirty ones, hide the latest book I’m reading, and change the time and alarm on my clock. In my closet they shrink my clothes, tangle up my hangers, and separate my blazers from the matching skirts and pants.

In my children’s bedrooms they throw all the clothes on the floor, break all the toys, scatter legos, undress dolls, and spill nail polish on carpets.

They like to take all the movies and either mix them up in the boxes or hide the boxes and throw everything on the floor.

On my bookshelves they place Stephen King next to Louisa May Alcott.

They put strange appointments on my calendar and hide my important phone numbers.

They call my phone number and leave weird messages or no messages at all.

I often wonder why I didn’t get the kind of elves that make shoes. I could use some new shoes. Especially since my elves hid mine.

Maybe if I made them little clothes they would go away. Of course they could always wear the clothes that they take off of the dolls.

Now see? I wrote that whole first column just so I could have a tie in with the last couple of lines of this one.

Which makes me wonder? While I am sleeping, do elves enter my brain and steal my ability to not ramble?