tea anyone?

I am babysitting.  The bane of every horror movie.  The baby is asleep upstairs and the house is quiet, except for the infernal clanging on the back deck from one too many wind chimes. It is time for me to nestle myself on the couch to watch Desperate Housewives.  I figured I would make a cup of tea before I got comfortable, and don't they usually leave a little snack for the sitter as well.  As I near the kitchen doorway I realize there is a baby safety gate in place.  For almost ten minutes I pushed and twisted, prodded and poked but I couldn't get the gate to open and I couldn't climb over it either since it stood waist high.  If this was a baby gate it was for the baby orangetan exhibit at the zoo.  I contemplated forgetting about the tea, but now it was the principle.  I should be able to win out over a stupid baby gate.  I pulled a dining room chair over to the gate, stepped up and over forgetting the drop on the other side was going to cripple me.  It didn't but now that I was in...there was no way out.  And certainly not carrying a cup of hot tea.  What if the baby got up?  I was beginning to see why they always wrote the babysitting thing into horror films. I pulled the kitchen nook bench over to the kitchen side of the baby gate from hell, and realized that this in fact would work.  I could have my damn tea after all.  Ha ha, take that baby gate!  I looked through four cupboards and two cabinets and couldn't find a mug or cup or anything that wasn't plastic or had Spongebob on it.  If there hadn't been one in the drainboard by the sink the whole tea deal was a bust.  It took another 10 minutes to find the tea bags that were cleverly hidden, but my cup was now locked and loaded and nuking away in the microwave.  I managed to get up on the bench without falling or burning myself, over the gate and onto the dining room chair still unscalded.  I balanced the cup on a shelf, knocking over a few framed pictures, and decended from the dining room chair.  My pride intact, I felt euphoric at my success. 

I took my tea over to the couch and looked for the remote.  There were three.  I pressed power on one of them.  Nothing.  I pressed TV on another one.  Nothing.  I pressed power on the third one and the box on top of the TV sprung to life.  The TV however remained dark.  I pressed TV on each remote again.  Nothing.  My tea was getting cold.  I decided that it made no sense to fight with yet another inanimate object so I left the remotes and took my tea over to the dining room table where my daughter's laptop sat.  I opened it and clicked on the Internet Explorer icon.  It wanted a password.  I guessed.  Wrong!  I guessed again.  Wrong again!  But then I remembered that my daughter had given me the password the last time I babysat and as I sat there trying to get my short term memory to kick in,  the monitor remained as dark as the TV screen.  I remembered hearing an infomercial guy talking about some product that helped you with memory and he said that simple math equations can sharpen your brain enough to help you remember things.  So there I sat with my cold tea and the dark TV and the laptop waiting patiently for a password doing multiplication out loud.  9 x 2 = 18, 9 x 3 = 24, 9 x 4 = 36, 9 x......and there it was....I remembered!  I typed in the password and waited for my mail to popup.  As I chatted with my sister in law on line the alarm went off.  Blaring, screaming alarm.  And then nothing.  I jumped up and called my son...the one with the broken toe.  The one I called an ass for breaking his toe.  The one I now wanted to limp over and help me check the doors and windows.  He came with a three foot sword.  My hero.  He checked the basement and didn't realize to question why the bench was by the baby gate.  I called my daughter's cell.  No answer.  My other daughter's cell.  Voicemail.  My son-in-law's cell....and she answered.  I couldn't hear her amongst the roar of the venue, but I did hear this....I DONT HAVE AN ALARM.   Oh yes you do!  And it works....and by the way,  I am not babysitting here anymore.  I will watch the baby at my house, buy a crib, a playpen, stay up all nght...whatever it takes....but this will be the last time I baby sit here.  Sorry!