Vignettes

Badge of Honor
I am not a naturally graceful or coordinated person, though I have, at times, been athletic.  I was captain of my high school swim team and I ran a marathon last month, so I'm not the stereotypical sport-phobic nerd girl, but neither am I capable of maneuvering around my world without consistently bashing into things.  This afternoon, I walked smack into my coffee table and banged my knee.  I was instantly transformed from functional adult to mewling child, writhing on the floor wishing I could somehow detach my knee, with its throbby bruise, from the rest of me.  Ow.  I limped around for an hour or two whining, and just now rolled up my pant leg to check the status of my horrible, dignity-destroying injury.

NOTHING.

It is incredibly frustrating when there is no physical mark to show you are not a crazy person when you hurt yourself.  I guess it's nice not to have a big purple bruise on my leg, but I want something to show that I earned my whining.


Prickly and Sticky
Today we went car shopping, and it was awful.  We drove out to Beaverton and ended up in the Budget Corral of one of the dealers there, a used lot that they keep safely separate from their main lot so that the cars don't infect their more expensive brethren with their crapitude.  The car we came to see was buried four rows into the impenetrable bumper-to-bumper lot, so even though we'd called ahead, we had to wait for about 20 minutes while junkers were driven, pushed and dragged out of the way.  During that time, we avoided billowing clouds of exhaust and admired the impressive and creepy piles of cacti in the dealership office.  The little storefront was filled floor to ceiling with shelves and shelves of cacti, and they had spilled out so that the cars parked nearest the door had pots of cacti on their hoods and roofs.  Cacti everywhere.  Finally, we got to the test-drive, and discovered that the steering wheel cover, a cheap plastic thing, had started to... degenerate?  Melt?  secrete mucus?  I don't know what was going on, but it was sticky all over.  Poor Spencer had to put his hands on it to drive.  The car was... awful.  The brakes made sketchy noises and the steering required massive amounts of upper body strength.  We returned it to the dealership.  Before we left, Spencer said "Wow, that's a lot of cacti."  "Yes, I'm weird."  said Errol, our used car salesman.

I'm inclined to agree.

Why are you all wet...? Oh.
Today I gave the cats their flea and tick treatment, that horrible stuff that goes on in a glob on that spot on their backs that they are not supposed to be able to reach (which they totally can, I swear, the non-reachable spot is a myth).  I globbed Moby, and then I tried to glob Mezzie.  Mezzie, however, proved somewhat difficult.  At first, I thought I could handle it because she was curled up in a round ball of fluffy fatness purring sleepily, and so I squeezed the tube over the spot with no particular urgency.  Mistake.  Mezzie smelled it and felt the wetness and took off in a physics-defying sprint.  Her voluminous... volume... and her sudden escape resulted in the stuff going nowhere near where it should have.  What I thought was the middle of her back was really a roll of fat that had sagged into that location while she was sleeping, and that is where I had deposited  the largest glob, which was trailed by a comet tail of failed medicine application marking where I'd tried to keep going as she ran for cover.  This happens every damn time, and so I don't know what makes me think I can actually do this properly.

Worse, though, is that all day I've been snuggling up with Moby, only to feel the tacky patch of smelly goo on his back and spend five seconds thinking "yuck! What is this?  It's all over me... oh.  Crap.  Remember not to pet Moby until his medicine is all absorbed.  Right."  Then I wash my hands, move on to another task for a few minutes and then see Moby and go snuggle his sweet little face because he is so cute and... oh. Damn.