I've spent 2 weekends in a row with my parents. Well, actually, I saw them 2 weekends in a row. Last Saturday I drove out to Hemet and made cookies with my mom as my step-dad put new brake pads on my car. They also made me lunch and I borrowed a few books.

Yesterday they took me out to lunch. My mom brought me grapes from her garden. They're funny because when we go out to eat they share a meal and then they use a cell phone to calculate the exact percentage for the tip.

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When I was in middle school we lived in a house that had blinds covering nearly every window. One of my chores was to dust the blinds. And "dust" didn't mean going over them with a feather duster. It meant cleaning each 1-inch blind one at a time with a dry cloth. As with all our chores, after we were done my mom would go through and make sure they were done completely. If she determined they were still dusty in any area, I would have to do it over again.

I thought I got smart one time and purchased one of those "blind duster" thingies. I don't know if you've ever seen one, but it's a plastic thing with like 5 foam pads evenly placed on the ends, so you dust the blinds in like groups of 5. I tried using it but unfortunately it just didn't do the job good enough. I had to go back to the dry cloth. I hated that chore.

What I never realized though was that one day, the skill of cleaning blinds meticulously would come in handy. See, a little less than a year ago, coming down from a drug binge I had a fit of rage because of something trivial and threw a cup of pink lemonade at the window. It was a paper cup and didn't do any damage but pink lemonade spilled all over our ugly mauve blinds here in my kitchen and dried to big a brown splatter. For some reason I just never cleaned it up.

Today that changed. I took a damp cloth and with the talent of an extensively trained professional I patiently, tediously cleaned each and every one of these blinds. Mom would be proud.