Mondays are typically hard to deal with on many different fronts.

For me, this Monday started with a near miss of a Michael Jackson incident when my hair dryer caught on fire.

I loved that hair dryer. I think I was more upset that my hair dryer caught on fire than about me almost catching myself on fire.

Ladies, commiserate with me for a second … We all have that one beauty tool — be it a great pair of tweezers, your most favorite curling iron or maybe a round brush just the right size for perfect curls. And when that one great beauty tool fails, there’s nothing in the world that can replace it or make your day get off to a better start.

I’ll confess upfront, I didn’t have my children on Monday morning. They were with their father — split household, you know — and I slept late.

So here I was, burrowed under the piles of blankets, and hard pressed to motivate myself to the shower. I got up and decided it was a good morning — bright and unhurried, and I was able to enjoy a cup of coffee before heading into the shower.

Most moms know how hard it is to get an unhurried cup of coffee. Almost unheard of, but I got one.

I jumped out of the shower and did a quick clock check — plenty of time to make arrange this new haircut of mine. Course, if you look at me now and my picture above, there’s not much difference. And generally, you wouldn’t think that a whole lot goes into a short hairdo. True, but you at least have to get wet hair dry, which leads me to the whole hair dryer on fire thing.

It was just one of those “el cheap-o kinds,” as my mom says. I got it in college, so granted it was one or two years old but worked like a charm. It takes a while to learn the best way a beauty tool works and I had honed my hair drying skills to an art — two minutes and I was out of there.

I started getting a little alarmed when it made these strange “clacking” noises — kind of like when you stick your hand in a ceiling fan.

Before the long, the rhythmic clack, clack, clack was punctuated by a burning smell. I shook it and popped it one good time with the palm of my hand, and it righted itself.

I went back to sweeping the device back and forth atop my head before grabbing the round brush so that I could tackle the underside of my bob.

Then I saw it in the mirror — the faint glow of orange in the rear of the dryer, which was immediately followed by the realization of the now strong smell of fire was tickling my nose.

Before long, the dryer was toast and I still had a wet head and the makings of a strange Monday … but that’s another story unto itself.

I guess the moral of this story is that there is no moral to this story. Life is just life. Some days we start it with hair dryers on fire and some days, thankfully, we don’t.

Either way, the day turned out to be exactly what I expected — great.