Habits
Does your "leaving the house routine" sometimes take 20 minutes because you have to check and recheck an ever-growing list of phantom hazards? Do you ever lock up the house, get in the car and drive away only to circle the block, return to your house and go through the checklist three one more time? Have you ever called a neighbor and asked them to go into your house with the spare key to check to see if you left the oven on? Do you routinely take your iron to work with you because at least then you can be assured that you didn't leave it plugged in? Have you ever been up early to get your kids ready for Storybook Character Day or Pajama Day at school and jumped in the car at 6 a.m. to drive by the school's reader board just to make sure that it's actually Storybook Character Day or Pajama Day because can you imagine how humilating it would be if you were a kid that showed up to school in your Thomas the Tank Engine PJs or with your face painted like Puss in Boots and it was just an ordinary Tuesday? Do you take cell phone picture as you leave the office to prove to your self in 20 minutes that you turned off your space heater? Have you ever found yourself on your front lawn at 11 p.m. with a headlamp looking for your kid's scooter so you can put it in the garage because if you don't, neighborhood hoodlums will steal it and your kid will be heartbroken? Have you ever been awakened by the warning beep on a carbon monoxide alarm only to find you have no new batteries, so you drove to Wal-Mart at 3 a.m. to get new batteries, and heck, why not a new alarm and then drove home, installed it and still stayed up until 7 a.m. to make sure that your family didn't die in its sleep because you might've installed the batteries wrong? Have you ever convinced yourself that you have mice in your walls and laid awake listening to them for three hours only to realize that it was actually just rain dripping from the gutters because it's Oregon in April and of course it is raining and why would mice be making completely rhythmic tapping sounds? Um yeah. Me either.
"Off. Off. Off. Off. Off." Repeat.
