Mari Ness - March 23rd, 2008

It's really, really annoying to have one of those dreams where you're searching for something, searching for something, searching for something....

....and in the end all you find is a bit of evidence that Dubya Bush was unfaithful to his wife (thanks, subconscious) and two kids making out on a bed utterly distressed because they can't open their bag of Cheetos.

Happy Easter for those who celebrate!

I've never been much for Easter egg decoration -- we did it when I was a kid, but somehow or other, my eggs never came out pretty enough.

Nonetheless, when our department decided to spend part of Friday afternoon decorating eggs, I joined in, and no, not just because cookies were involved, although that helped, despite my protests that I wasn't artistic enough for this kinda thing.

"What's artistic about it?" protested a few others. "We're putting stickers on eggs."

"She isn't," I said, pointing.

This was true; the coworker I was pointing at had found golden nail polish and a few sparkle things and was creating imitation Faberge eggs -- quite impressive, actually.

"We're doing stickers," said everyone else.

So I made a blue egg and rolled it in glitter so it would be a glittering blue egg, and a green egg that looked exactly like Kermit the Frog if you were willing to use a lot of imagination, which my coworkers in general weren't, and ooohed and aahed with everyone else over the Faberge egg, and the grey egg with the simple words on it, "Bad Egg" and the eggs that just had stickers on them. Most of our eggs were, I must admit, in all honestly for posterity, uttely hideous, but still twas fun, especially because, as I've hinted, cookies were involved. But my, um, Not Exactly Kermit the Frog egg proved, I feared, that even though I can roll blue eggs in glitter with the rest of them, egg decoration is probably not a potential career for me.

(The faux Faberge eggs won the decorating contest, hands down.)

I refused to take the eggs home, on the basis that others deserved to see blue glitter and as far as the other eggs went, I did not want to turn my home into the last resort for bad eggs.

This morning I got a knock on the door from a neighbour who looked sad. "Do you want these?" she asked.

I looked. They were -- and I have no way to soften this blow -- the most hideous Easter eggs I have ever seen.

"I know," said the neighbour in despair. "I'm just not very good at this. And I have guests coming over and everything. I can't let them see these."

"I know the feeling," I said.

The eggs are safely hidden in my fridge. And now, for today's most critical Easter task -- hunting down laundry detergent.