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It had been a long day. I spent the wee hours of the morning explaining to Alex, the Uni.ted ticketing agent that NO! I was not a terrorist even though the plane reservation for the flight–made by one of their agents–was in my married name and the ticket and my passport were in my maiden name (the old Dolan vs. Drake saga strikes again!). After two hours of clearing that up, we ran through the airport to security only to be the last passengers to board the plane.

Then we got to Frankfurt and hooked up to the wi-fi and decided to check out the newest Bulgarian immigration laws, which (without going into too much detail) pointed to our imminent deportation….which was immediately followed by the grand mal of panic attacks, irrational thought, and nearly opting just to live indefinitely in the Frankfurt Airport a la Tom Hanks in The Terminal.

Which was followed by profuse sweating in the Sofia airport and prayers to pass through the border. Which was followed by waiting more than two hours, only to find that two bags were missing, one of which contained A COMPUTER!!!!

So I decided I needed a hot bath in my coffin-sized tub to relieve the stress.

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There I was, chilling and sudoku-ing away, when a dark fleck caught the corner of my eye.

“Hmmmm….dirt from my 24 hours of travel”, I thought as I went about my bathing. But then I noticed a few more specks. And a few more. And on closer inspection, I noticed they seemed to move against the flow of the bath water. So I flicked one up onto the side of the tub. And that peice of dirt did the best magic trick ever. It.moved.by.itself. BY ITSELF!!!

Yeah. That’s when it dawned on me. Those weren’t specks of dirt, or even long strings of dirt. No siree. They were worms. I was bathing amongst worms. Long skinny wiggly ones. Gross ones. And so I called in my prince.

“Babe, look at this. There are worms in here”, I calmly told him as I stood with only my feet in the water. (I know you don’t believe that calmly part, but truly, I was too exhausted to even care if I was bathing with worms).

“Hmmm…I think they are coming from these little never-been-used jacuzzi jets “, he pondered aloud as he pushed the ON button. (Who wants jets pounding on you when the tub is so small your hips are squeezed in between the two sides?) And then they came. The locusts worms. By the hundreds. Swarming about my ankles. It took me a minute to fully register what was occuring, but when I did, I leapt up, and with a gymnast’s balance, positioned my bunioned feet on the very edge of the coffin tub.

Indeed the entire tub filled with worms and gunk. I watched in amazement for a while, then cleaned it out, stepped inside, turned on the shower, soaped up (extra-good), rinsed, and left. **sigh**
What better end to a perfectly lousy day? And how else to be sure that the tub truly is shaped like a coffin? I mean the worms seep inside just like a grave. Which now that I think about it……no, wait, let’s not think about it anymore….