Once, I also dissected a worm and held its skin back with pins in wax. I wanted to die.

My Saturday was supposed to include picking up my mother-in-law and, I guess you'd say aunt-in-law, from their hotel. Shopping! Shopping! My heart was aflutter. Or something. I was excited; I wanted shoes! Jeans! A shirt! A bag! Something! Dave's on the water! His "No, get it, it's OK" couldn't guilt me into not getting something.

A day of beautiful, beautiful unrelenting shopping. Wonderful womanly stuff.

Then Dave called, mid-dream at 8:15 a.m.

"I need you to do me a favor," he said over the phone from his perch on the lake, in his uncle's boat with his dad.

"OK."

"I need you to tell me what kind of fish this is," he said.

Uh, yes. Erin. Me. Fish. Over the phone. I am to identify. God.

"Uh, Ohhh-Kay ..."

"See, if it's one kind, it's good eatin' (yes, with a Southern accent); and the other is jail time," he said. "S-A-U-G-E-R or walleye."

I said I'd call him back, and then hit Google.

Honestly, he should've given me a calculus exam. I was Googling like it was no one's business, and all I got were diagrams and university Web sites that gave me post-traumatic stress disorder-like symptoms about sophomore biology and working solid magic to avoid taking biology in college.

Retinas. Elliptical body shape. Eye film. Good Lord, I thought, I'm going to tell him something and he'll end up in jail, over some stinkin' fish. I'd have to hire a lawyer; I'd be up to my arms in fishiness for years. Dang him, dang him.

I called back. "It says a DNR agent will have to tell," I said. Not a lie. But it also said a bunch of biology stuff. "And there's a third kind -- a saugeye." (I used the word "saugeye." God.) "It says something about body shape." Biology class! Nightmares!

"I don't know; I don't want to do this," I said.

And that was it; I was thanked, and then spent the rest of the afternoon alternatively shopping and hoping I didn't have to bail anyone out of jail. Because taking that money and bailing out a husband is not how I want to spend it. Buying unreasonably cute jeans? OK. Yes, that's better.