I’ve had the day from Hell. Not just your average day from Hell either. It was an authentic, fire and brimstone, forked tongue, red-headed-dude with the pointed rake, day from Hell.

(Okay, rake…pitchfork…whatever.)

My power was out. All. Day. Long. And without power can’t charge your cell phone, or your laptop. And you most definitely can’t get on the internet. And this makes for a day from Hell.

My husband, who was working from home, decided he would go to the coffee shop to hop on the WiFi, and have a cup of coffee while we waited for the electric company to come fix the outage in our area.

After wearing out his welcome at the local Starbucks, he picked me up and we went for lunch at the closest restaurant with a WiFi connection. The next stop was the book store, where we set up camp for several hours until our laptop batteries were going dead. The chicken shop around the corner had a booth with an electrical outlet, so we moved in there for a few hours, where I ate enough buffalo chicken dip to feel sick, and drank enough Diet Coke to stay awake for a month.

We played this musical WiFi game all day long, until finally I felt compelled to run home to feed the dogs.

So I left my husband in a parking lot, on a conference call, while I went home to stumble around my house in the dark, searching for candles and batteries. (Someone needs to remind me to stock up on candles, batteries and flashlights, by the way, because I didn’t seem to have a single one!)

Finally, after almost twelve hours without electricity, the power came back on…just in time for dinner. And since my husband was already in the parking lot of our favorite restaurant, it only seemed fitting to meet him there to eat.

Several drinks later, I was sending text messages and tweets without bothering to read them (something I’d sworn, just days ago, I would never do again) and I managed to tell the world I was gonna ghetto the cat, whatever that means. I think I was saying I was gonna go to the car, but after three drinks I really don’t know what I was trying to say. Maybe I really was about to “ghetto the cat”. Henry Chow would be a cool ghetto cat, with gold chains and a tattoo. After all, when he was taken by an owl, the owl brought him back. Only a ghetto cat could be that cool, right?

Until the next time…I’ll be nursing a hangover!

Remember when a dirty word was something you weren’t allowed to say? Or being dirty required washing of some sort? Well, dirty isn’t always bad, but it certainly makes things more interesting.

So I was thinking about the word dirty today and I realized how much I like it. It can mean something different every time. I decided I’d make a list…a short list perhaps…but a list just the same.

Dirty rice is a spicy dish.

Dirty socks…not so much.

Dirty dancing is spicy fun.

Dirty feet are simply gross.

Dirty sex is pretty hot.

Dirty crotch is definitely NOT.

Dirty words are secret fun.

Dirty underpants are worse than NONE!

Ok, so my rhyming needs work, but you get the point. When someone calls you dirty it just might be a compliment.

Ok…and off the topic of dirty, but just slightly. I want to bring up the whole Auto Correct epidemic. I was completely infected today by an auto correct moment of epic proportions. I was napping. I know…the girl who doesn’t sleep was napping? And yes…I was. Even I need sleep sometimes. But I was awakened by a tweet or two, and felt compelled to respond immediately…before my eyes were completely focused, mind you.

My friend and editor Laura mentioned she had eaten marshmallows today. This is only significant because marshmallows play a part in my book, To Katie with Love, and these days the in-jokes are many…so we were laughing about that. And I mentioned I’d had a really good dream that was interrupted by the phone “just as I was about to put the brownie in my mouth!” (And what could be worse than being pulled out of a dream right before you get to eat a hot, fresh, just out of the oven brownie, right?) Wrong…even worse than that…wayyyy worse than that, in fact, is when your auto correct changes that sentence to say, “And the phone rang just as I was about to put the brownish KY in mouth!”

And, of course, Laura was speechless. How exactly is one supposed to respond to that?

I swear on a stack of whatever book you put in front of me that I have NO IDEA why my phone chose brownish KY over brownie. And I suspect I will never, in all my years, live it down.

Or the other message I sent that changed the word long to kong (and again, I said, “Really auto correct? Kong?”) It’s amazing how something so innocent can end up being so…dirty.

But hey, it’s the word of the day, isn’t it?

Until the next time…I will be carefully reading every text before hitting send.