12/21/11

Messy Christmas


'Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not kids nor the spouse.
                                         The stockings were hung o'er the rail of the stair;
                                         The laundry was flung o'er the backs of the chairs.

The dishes grew mellow, the trash overflowed;
Dogs wished to be walked, no matter how cold.
                                        On, Girlie! On, Bella! On, Mack barely trained~
                                        Your human is weary and utterly drained.

The heat is too high, the house is too hot;
I'm going to suffocate~ I kid you not.
                                       The state of the living room causes me pain;
                                       The tree glistens proudly~ 'mongst chaos it reigns.

"We'll straighten it up in a couple of hours
There's sleeping and Facebook and eating and showers."
                                       And so from my house that is perched on an isthmus,
                                      I wish one and all a Jolly Good Christmas!



12/13/11

Weird Stuff That Happens Sometimes

 These strangely beautiful pictures were accidentally taken by my cellphone... IN MY POCKET, my front jeans pocket, I guess when I mashed against one of the outer buttons, the camera came up. And snapped pocket pics! They just look like bubbles. How come some of them are light and some are dark I wonder...?
This has happened to Scott before too, and his pictures look pretty much the same as this, like an eyeball or a weird nipple. Yeah some of them look like nipples .. with a dark aureola.. or Saturn .. or like a close up of a metal snap. None of which is in or near my pocket. Has this ever happened with your camera phone? ...
So, here I sit, in front of this computer at 1:00 am and having scraped out the last little bit of Nutella out of the jar, my mind starts to think of things-REALLY weird stuff that has happened to me before. Things that just blow my mind whenever I think about them.
Here's a couple of things that happened to me several years ago, back in Austin. These things stay fresh in my mind, because they are just so astonishing. I am not sure I can convey the weirdness of these events, but I'll try.
                                                         
                                                         THE MISSING KEYS
One time I couldn't find my car keys. Here, I can't quite remember exactly how long my keys were missing, but I did have to dig up an alternate set. I took the girls to school. That was a trip that consisted of about one major hill, some bumps over the Lamar Bridge and numerous turns and a curved exit, a round trip I made twice that day and every day. Anyway, at some point I was in the driveway and happened to walk past my car and spotted the Hello Kitty keyring- sitting on top of the car on the passenger side between the rear window, and where the trunk starts, were the missing keys. Absolutely nothing was holding them on there. I have no idea how they stayed on my car. Even just stopping or starting at lights it seems like they should have slid off.
The car didn't even have good shocks. They would scrape metal every time I'd hit a bump or a pothole.
                                                        
                                           RUSH HOUR ENTERTAINMENT
I always have my cup of tea with me. Nowadays I have a porcelain tumbler with a silicon snap-on lid and a sippy-hole that fits nicely into the cup holder. That day, several years ago, I just had an oversized coffee mug.
Driving from our house toward South Lamar took one huge hill and a series of sharp turns, high-speed merges, and some red lights. The traffic as usual was hectic until all 3-4 lanes came to a standstill at the light before the Lamar Bridge. Bumper to bumper, waiting.. when someone yells HEY, THERE'S A CUP ON YOUR CAR! And OMG my big coffee cup on the rear fender still has my tea in it, I have not spilled a drop. It was astonishing.

                                         AMAZING PHOTO COINCIDENCE
Shortly before we decided to move away from Austin, we rented a friend's house at Lake Travis. The lake was low, and not expected to rise much, but it was understood that the house we were staying in was occasionally put completely underwater about every 25 years. A flood house. It was a cute little house, built of cinderblocks with cool 50s chrome and porcelain cabinets. While we were there, we bought an Airstream, it was brought there from somewhere else. That trailer was full of old rotting junk and mostly just trash. When we cleaned it out, there were some old slightly water damaged Polaroid pictures, from the 80s it looked like- of some cowboy people and 2 of the pictures were of a flooded place.. and on closer inspection, it was plain that the photos were taken of the very place we were living -while it was under the water! You could see the top of the swing set sticking up above the water and the trees and other points that matched up.. IT WAS THE VERY PLACE  THAT TRAILER WAS TO BE TAKEN TO YEARS LATER!!! Think about it. Weird huh? Scott asked the people we got the trailer from about it, and they said they had no connection with that place .. they said "Oh, they had just randomly driven around after that flood and took some pictures."
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 One of those really weird things happened today. We were going to buy some paint to finally finish the outside of the house with, and they didn't seem to have the paint chip in there on the little sample cards you know.. and we stood there awhile and kind of argued.. He wanted to get someone to look up the code and mix it, and I said If they don't even have the chip, and the right kind of paint, then we are waiting.. and of course that's how it went.. since I walked away, and he followed.. LOL.
I was worried that maybe that color was no longer available- I had no idea where at home I might have put one of the paint chips that I had kept, and I was kind of wondering how I was going to find it.
Meanwhile the checkbook was in my purse because the one check we wrote in at least 2 years was needed today to buy a 1951 jeep truck for another restore and sell project.. and then I asked him when we got home if he had the checkbook, because he hadn't given it back to me. He pulls it out of his coat and there is something tucked inside. GUESS WHAT. It was the paint chip card, FROM MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, MORE LIKE 2 YEARS. INSIDE THE CHECKBOOK. >insert twilight zone music and narrative by Rod Serling here<
It hadn't been there before. It picked it up out of my purse (okay, BUSTED- I never clean my purse out) I didn't know it was in there. I could have thrown that checkbook in about 3 different compartments in there but the one I chose happened to have that paint card and that checkbook happened to pick it up in my purse and come out right when we were needing it.
How weird is that?