This Happened

[Phoebe]

My dog just threw up my tampon. That is all. I'm done.

[Zen]

[Phoebe]

It feels extremely close to cannibalism.

[Zen]

Animal vomit of any sort should not touch flesh... especially flesh that is normally covered by clothing!

[Phoebe]

I feel we have misunderstood one another but that it's too upsetting to clarify.

[Zen]

Well, I might have lost a pair of jeans to dog vomit last night... Evidently they were in a laundry basket sitting next to the closet in my bedroom, where one of the dogs, who has periodic problems tossing up his dinner, sleeps most of the time... My wife made the executive decision that she didn't want to put them through her washing machine...

[Phoebe]

Ewww. At some moments the light bulb of cost-benefit analysis flashes on and says, "go forward now, free from the need to clean this [insert here... vomit, poop, blood, etc], as you are going to simply purchase a new one."

[Zen]

I believe they were really cheap jeans... probably not name brand... I rarely buy name brand...

[Phoebe]

FYI men's "Lucky" brand jeans say "Lucky You" on that piece of fabric that sits just inside the zipper. It's a real gift of eyeroll to some of us who find ourselves in a position to read the text, as it were.

As an amusing corollary, I have a pair of Lee jeans that says dumb shit like "you're amazing!" and "you're beautiful" inside the waistband so you see it when you're on the toilet. Just one more of the fun gender differences.

[Zen]

So, I spent New Year's day driving up to the Chicago suburbs to pick my daughter up from her boyfriend's house. She, once again, spent NYE with his family this year. On the way, I started having a little bit of a cough. Nothing major, but a bit annoying. By Tuesday morning I was running a fever of over 101 degrees! Ugh... I ended up missing two days of work. I hope I didn't give it to her boyfriend's family, as they were about to head to Florida for a vacation!

[Phoebe]

Bah, the entire airport was a worse exposure. Hope you feel better soon - but then, I don't really want to leave my house until Monday at the earliest, so there could be advantages!

[Phoebe]

Here is a true story so bizarre but true, I could never make this up if I dreamed it first. So some may recall the person I thought was my best friend for several years just up and, as the kids say, "ghosted" me one day. To this day I have no fucking idea why. Today I get ... a Christmas card from her family. A Christmas card. Could be from her husband, I don't know, could be from her. No signature, it's just the standard postcard thing with photo. I just laugh, you know, what else is there to do with that? I still think of her four years later because I don't get it - we could have been friends, been nice, and if she didn't like the friendship much, could have let it slide some, be less important, less frequent... a kind of gentle drift down. That's fine. Life changes happen. But why does she think of me, assuming she does and that's not simply her husband sending a card? Why would my name even cross her lips or mind, if she's so sure of the necessity and wisdom of what she chose to do all by herself? And if she's not sure, well, there she sits full of the powers to change it any time she likes! I just find it hilarious, that's all. I'm not looking forward to some of the gifts old age is destined to bring - I don't feel strong enough to handle them sometimes. But if nothing else, my goodness, this experience has made me a stronger person in some weird way.

Whoops, in my zeal to add this fact, which I discovered later in the evening, I didn't mean to delete the earlier observation! For some reason: Anonymous Caller again! And yes, that person needs therapy. I really like most of the people I have encountered here and don't mean to be so negative, but people come in all kinds, recently. Mostly the kind that wants to give deep affirmative action efforts to white men just like them, call people like they're age 10 at a slumber party, and play whatever their idiotic game is today with people whose names they should have long forgotten. So I'm trying to maintain a normal good cheer about the Other People, who have better to offer as a class.

[Phoebe]

I have a favorite squirrel which is a little crazy because let's face it, squirrels are rodents who don't share any liking for me. My favorite squirrel lives somewhere above our yard and eats all the stuff off one of our trees, and s/he hangs out in the yard all the time and taunts the dog. This morning I accidentally ran over the squirrel but did not actually kill it, so that it was flopping and thrashing about in agony in the road. I had to go back just to run over the squirrel and kill it without disclosing to the kid that this is what I was doing. I feel sick and I'm ready to give up on the whole ball of Wax.

[Phoebe]

Husband has a fun but realistic theory about my former friend sending me a belated holiday card (when we were close enough before that we used to have a separate get-together at Christmas to exchange gifts): it delivers us (and our kids) a picture of their kids, who used to be my kids' closest friends. So there's that. I have spent some mental energies on wondering what my crime was, but as my husband points out, whatever the hell it was (?!?!), it really could never have been as bad as what was suddenly and without explanation inflicted on our innocent kids in the process.

[Zen]

So... my son and his buddy who is staying with us were going to head up to the Chicago area to hang out with friends from college on Monday. One of their friends isn't returning to school next semester and they wanted to get together with her before heading back to school. The weather forecast was originally calling for snow showers most of the day in both Champaign and Chicago, then it downgraded and it was only a bit of snow up in Chicago part of the day. Still, my wife wanted him to take her car instead of his, since one of his headlights is out and she didn't want him to get pulled over for something stupid like that....

They were picking up one of their friends in the far west burbs first, then head to the home of the guy they were staying with, then take the train into the city. Google Maps took them off the expressway on surface streets WAY south of the burbs to get to the friend's place in the west burbs. Shortly after getting off the expressway, they spun out on a bridge (over a river) and hit the guardrail. (When he was taking the pictures of it he said it was practically solid ice. He almost fell walking on the bridge...) Luckily, they weren't going very fast and nobody was hurt. He called me immediately to tell me about it and sent me a picture. I asked if the car was drive-able , which it was, and then asked him where exactly the place he was going was in relation to I-80. He told me and I gave him better directions that took him there ALL ON THE EXPRESSWAY. (I wish I would have paid more attention when he told me the route before he left! If I had known where the town was that his friend lived, I would have told him not to follow the route anyway and just to stay on the expressway. Even if the other route was "shorter" it was probably faster to go by the expressway!)

He started heading to his friend's place on the expressway, but called before long and said that the steering had a shimmy when he went over 60 mph. I suggested it might be best if he just come home and call off the trip. He agreed.

Interestingly, the shimmy went away on the way home...

So, we have to get my wife's bumper fixed. We've already filed the damned insurance claim. We just have to schedule the time to do it. Unfortunately, my wife needed to take my daughter to a doctor's appointment on Tuesday, so she had to take my car up to the burbs that day to do that, since it is the only other car that has an IPass in it. (My daughter is already back at boarding school.) I got into my car to go to work this morning and... there was a warning light for low coolant! WTF! I asked my wife if any lights had come on while she was driving. (It always has a couple of stupid sensors that don't work that leave the "Check Engine" and one other amber colored warning on, but this one is the big red triangle one in the middle of the display... hard to miss.) She didn't remember it coming up...

So she had to take me to work and we're going to put off the work on her bumper until we figure out what the deal is with my old Volvo... Blah!

[Phoebe]

That's so scary - it's lucky nobody was hurt! Hope the car is not hurt, but it doesn't sound good.

[akiva]

Nothing like a department meeting to remind me how bad I am at my job.

[Phoebe]

Nothing like meetings in general! To bring us Joy. Actually I really love a good productive meeting. But that's because of the contrast.

[akiva]

[Phoebe]

Amazingly we have quite a few useful ones at my office. But we have a full range of kinds. It used to be more exciting back when I just watched and there was more combat from unstable people who might use profanity. I have two per month now where the higher ups fight with subtle maneuvers. It is like watching kendo of the mind.