Bizarre

A day in my life...

My dermatologist has me use some stuff on my face at night to help deal with allergies. Somehow, as I slept I managed to get some in my right eye, I think. When I woke up, miraculously NOT at 4:20, my eye was stingy and I had the skin gunk all caked sexily in the corner of my eye. That’s how I get all my men, by the way. So I got up and took a shower, and put on my hypoallergenic moisturizer, and instilled my allergy eye drops. Realizing it was going to be a "bad allergy day" this was followed by mass consumption of both prescription and over the counter allergy remedies. Clarinex, is a gift from heaven, the pharmacist is your friend, and dosage guidelines are for wussies.

So all is well, I manage to bathe and dress myself, including contact lenses, without doing myself or anyone else any dire harm. The evil furries I live with apparently had a shedding ritual while I slept, as I got a face full of cat fur as I snuggled up to them on the couch to say goodbye for the day. I did this by kneeling down in front of the couch, of course, because those two ungrateful wretches were hogging the entire couch. I see other people with cats who curl up in cute little tiny balls. Not my kitties. Girly Kitty is fifteen months old now, and she and Mon Petit Amour are both bigger than the White Witch. Perhaps their personal trainers have advised them that they must completely stretch out in order to maintain the maximum ability to wreck my stuff when I am not home. Even though I am a cat Mommy, I am technically allergic to cats, and the nose full of fur was not a good addition to my already allergy critical day.

Benadryl, you can mix that with Sudafed and Clarinex, right?

Off I go to the Public Library to get my money’s worth on my taxes by using the free UNFILTERED wifi. I do not want the children and various and sundry other nosey people there to read my writing, or see how much time I waste on D-Listed. I always like to find a private table against the wall, not a carrel, or a shared area in the middle. All my regular spots were taken. So, I am wandering about, looking for a good place to compute with a reasonable expectation of privacy and access to an electrical outlet. When what to my wondering eyes should appear, but the coupon exchange area. Ah, the only thing I love more than coupons are coupons I don’t have to cut out. Score! So I am mindlessly looking for shampoo and cat litter coupons when a little old man wanders up to the table. He proceeds to chat my ear off as we shuffle through the coupons. Normally I do not mind little old men, or ladies, or anybody else, chatting with me when I am obviously out in public and available to be spoken with. However, this was a freak show.

During the course of shuffling through the coupons, he informed me how he used to be crippled by arthritis when he was younger. Then he began taking 30 vitamins a day, and now he is fine, and he is in better health now that he is 80, then when he was 30. I am a nerd, so I told him I was there to use my computer, and was looking for a plug, and happened upon the coupon joy. He told me I am very pretty, and if I don’t have a husband, I can come over his house and use my computer there. He then told me he is a widower. His wife died five years ago, and he was lonely, and nobody will come home with him. I expressed the requisite non-committal condolences to strangers who have just divulged that someone presumably precious to them has passed away. He then went on to tell me that it was awful because one of the neighbor ladies lured her away and beat her death. The neighbors think he did it, and he told the cops about the neighbor lady, but nobody believes him. Right about now I am wondering what else he is on besides vitamins. Seriously, if this guy were not an 80-year-old dude I could easily have kicked the shit out of, I would have run. Why do these people always find me? I need to learn to be more aloof, or at least look like I carry a gun or something.

So then I give up on the coupon situation, no cat litter relief to be found. I wander around again looking for outlets to plug in my laptop. I finally found an unused one in a little furniture grouping. There is already a guy there sitting on one of the couches. No biggie, this is a public place after all. So, I start to take my stuff out of my laptop case, and get plugged in to the outlet, and pull out my headphones. The guy who was already there invites me to sit next to him to share the table. I say; "no, I’ll just curl up here on the couch, just like at home." He tells me there are some open desks on the center of the library. I tell him I do not like to sit there in the middle. I like to sit against the wall so nobody can read what I am writing, or doing on my computer. He says; "ooh, are you looking at porn?" I tell him; "no, I just hate nosey people." So, eventually he goes away, or so I think. He comes back after I have moved my stuff on to the table, and then proceeds to keep trying to look at my laptop screen. He would have been sorely disappointed to see I was merely working on my resume and job hunting if he had been able to get a good peek. I just have no idea why weird people attach themselves to me. Maybe there just are no normal people, and I am not able to come to grips with that reality yet. Perhaps, I am flypaper for freaks, as I have long suspected. Perhaps, I am their queen, and have not yet come to grips with my own glaringly obvious eccentricities.

At the end of this surreal day I have bunkered down at home to reconcile my checkbook in my office. I am sitting there watching trashy TV. Where do they find these people? Who dresses these dorks? The lingo used to describe "seduction routines" sounds like a cross between a Star Trek convention and a Dungeons and Dragons symposium. So I am sitting there minding my own business, entering my receipts to Money, wondering how Mystery ever gets laid, when, all of a sudden, the ceiling fan makes a horrible racket, drops a couple feet, and spins around like a ball on a tether. Luckily, whatever caused this also broke the fan, and it goes off. After I assure myself I have neither pissed nor shit myself, other surefire ways by which I get my men by the way, I slither along the wall to turn off the switch for the fan.

Once I hit the wall switch for the fan, I happily ventured to the basement to shut off the breaker in my brand new breaker box. I try the switch labeled office, to no avail. After some experimentation, I manage to get the TV in the office to go silent. I had left it on very loudly so I could be sure when I had shut off the electricity to the office without running up and down the basement stairs every time I flicked a switch. Then I go upstairs and grab a pair of scissors to cut the only remaining wire that is holding the ceiling fan to the ceiling. I decide it may be best to leave the breaker for the office off. However, I discover some problems in the rest of the house. At first, I think there may be a breaker thrown that I did not notice, or perhaps when the ceiling fan careened about it caused other electrical items to short out.

After significant experimentation, much changing of unbroken bulbs, and intense swearing regarding the cost of replacement of apparently non-functioning air conditioners, televisions, and a computer, I discovered another quirk of my old house. When I had the electrical service updated, I had told the electricians my Dad had always told us the house had lot of strange configurations of the mechanicals, but was well constructed. All the contractors agreed, and when the new service went in, we transferred the labeling from the fuses to the breakers, knowing we had no freaking idea all each circuit entailed. Thanks to the ceiling fan calamity, I found out that all the outlets in one half of my living room, and all the outlets in three of the bedrooms on the main floor of my house are on the same circuit. I also found out all the ceiling lighting in these same rooms are not on the that same circuit but are on the same circuit together. What that means is not only do I not have to replace most of my small and mid size appliances, but also that I am one lucky ducky. I started to cry when I realized I had stood on a metal chair in my bare feet and cut a live wire with a pair of sewing scissors. Never a dull moment at the Money Pit I call home.