It's Always Darkest Before the Fridge Door Opens: Enjoying the Fruits of Middle Age by Phil Callaway, Martha O. Bolton

at it. Believe it or not, there are even some advantages to this hard-to-swallow reality of today’s world.
    The Blessings of Rising Gas Prices
    Don’t just sit there complaining about the rising price of gas. Look at the hidden blessings that come along with those prices. Here are just ten of them; we’re sure you can think of more:
    1. We’ve been practicing riding stationary bikes for years in our basements and at our gyms. Now we finally might have the incentive to actually get outside and do it for real.
    2. Fewer Hummers and SUVs to have to maneuver around in a parking lot.
    3. Instead of planning that cross-country road trip, we can now finally visit that local campground that almost had to close its doors last summer.
    4. We can turn the abandoned parking lots into tennis courts.
    5. We can walk to work every Monday. Get there by Friday.
    6. High gas prices are the perfect excuse to avoid the in-laws.
    7. No more teenagers cruising the boulevards on the weekends.
    8. No matter where we’re from, it gives us all something in common to talk about, besides the weather.
    9. Parents don’t complain about their teenagers skateboarding anymore.
    10. We keep the mileage down on our vehicles.

PART FOUR

Empty Shelves
(Overworked, Overstressed, Overwhelmed,
and Underappreciated—and That’s the Good News)

The Stress Diet
    Breakfast
    1 slice multi-grain toast (lightly buttered)
    1 orange (lightly squeezed)
    1 cup bran cereal (no sugar)
    6 oz. skim milk
    Mid-morning
    8 oz. iced tea
    Lunch
    6 oz. lean chicken
    Leaf of lettuce, small
    8 oz. water, no lemon
    Small cluster of grapes
    Small scoop of ice cream
    Mid-afternoon snack
    Mix handful of peanuts, pound of fudge, and a box of chocolates into remaining ice cream. Finish carton.
    Dinner
    1 large pizza (loaded) with extra cheese
    1 medium pan lasagna
    Gallon of root beer
    2 slices raspberry cheesecake (eat with your hands)
    More pizza (eat with your hands)
    More ice cream (eat with your face)
    Bedtime snack
    3 packages of Rolaids 3
    8 tablespoons Pepto Bismol 4
    If people concentrated on the really important things in life,
there’d be a shortage of fishing poles.
Doug Larson
    3 This is a joke.
    4 This is also a joke.

Choose Your Rut Carefully
    I don’t know the key to success,
but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
Bill Cosby
    We love reading road signs. Like the one welcoming you to Kettle Falls, Washington, the home of ‘‘1,255 friendly people and one grouch.’’ In Hilt, California, a sign advises: ‘‘Brakeless trucks, use freeway.’’ Along Oregon’s winding coast, another sign warns: ‘‘Emergency stopping only. Whale watching is not an emergency. Keep driving.’’ There’s a service station somewhere with a bold sign proclaiming, ‘‘We have Mexican food. We have gas.’’ While traveling through Kentucky, I (Martha) once saw a traffic warning sign by a construction site on the interstate that said, ‘‘Whoa!’’ and the next one said, ‘‘Leave the racing to the horses!’’ But our favorite of them all is posted on an Alaska highway: ‘‘Choose your rut carefully. You’ll be in it for the next two hundred miles.’’
    Have you noticed that when you’re rushing to get to your destination, you hardly notice any road signs? You’re so focused on arriving that the journey becomes more of a blur than a trip. You ate, but you don’t really remember where. You stopped for gas but couldn’t say which town you were in. You saw an accident, but if anyone was injured, you wouldn’t know it because all you could do was complain about the traffic jam it caused.
    Rushing also causes us to make more mistakes. We miss our exit and don’t realize it until we’re twenty-six miles down the road. We can’t stop to check out that funny noise our engine is making until we have to stop because the funny noise has left us stranded by the side of the road on I-40. Or we race down the street only to hit every red light