Perhaps it's a Midwestern thing, dating back to my childhood in Minnesota. Whenever my mother needed something in a hurry, she would send us kids down to what she called the "corner grocery store." The store was not located on a corner and was about a mile from our house. But wherever we lived in Minneapolis, the neighborhood always had a corner grocery store where we could go for emergency supplies.

I have a corner grocery store near my home in Land Park, too. This store is even located on a corner. It's closer than driving to Walgreens on Broadway. I imagine the clerk behind the counter yesterday afternoon may have wondered why I was buying 3 huge bottles of nail polish remover. Most of the clientele for this store buy individual cans of beer or bags of potato chips. Hey, I watch AMC's Breaking Bad. So, I know that clerks sometimes report customers who buy unusual quantities of certain types of products to the police.

I then rushed back home to hand the bottles of acetone to my husband. He was frantically scrubbing the tile floor in the family room. Want to know why?

My manicurist, Rosa, works at a nail salon just past William Land Park on Freeport. This salon is where a few other Lyon real estate agents go to get their nails done. Rosa always slips my bottle of nail polish, emery board and file sponge into a plastic baggie and drops it in my bag after doing my nails. When I came home from my nail appointment yesterday, I tried to carefully extract this plastic baggie from my bag without messing up my nails.

Well, the baggie was not sealed. The bottle of nail polish crashed to the tiled floor and shattered, spraying red nail polish on the floor, our Oriental rug and my Coach bag. How many things can I ruin at once? Never in my 57 years of life have I broken a bottle of nail polish.

Since my nails were still wet, I couldn't clean it up. I screamed for my husband to help. First priority was to get the polish off the tiled floor before it soaked into the grout or permanently stained the tiles. Second was my Coach bag. I suspect the lifetime warranty for these bags doesn't offer protection when its owner dumps nail polish on it.

The rug? Well, my husband pointed out that I've been yakking about buying a new sofa. Knowing me as well as he does, he says I'll want to buy a new rug anyway. It's the way the world of home improvement works. Soon as you fix or replace something, other items start to talk to you. They say, "Hey, what about me? Am I not an eyesore, too?"

This morning I discovered that our cat, Pia, has a long red whisker. She has a few dried red hairs on her back, too. I can clip those, but I think I had better leave Pia's whisker alone and wait for it to fall out.

Photo: Elizabeth Weintraub