Epic Hodge Podge

I have an ongoing quest for the perfect pair of aviator style shades. It's tricky to find just the right shape. No, it's really, REALLY tricky--don't you belittle my tribulations!! Anyway, I have a silver pair and a gold pair, but those are pairs I've just settled for. But, y'know, even with less-than-optimum aviators, the vibe you convey is authoritative cool , a la "Do you know how fast you were going sir/ma'am??" Oh, and this cool-effect is compounded when you wear aviators with the mirrored lenses. Yeah, look at yourself lookin' at myself. See you gape at my authoritative cool.

But I wonder...what sort of weird hybrid persona are you putting on when you drive down the road wearing mirrored aviators over your RX horn rimmed glasses? Granted, these are not chunky Drew Carey-caliber horn rims, they are a slimmer, more femme version. So I imagine the effect is sexy librarian...with a badass streak. Either that or just batshit crazypants. I assure you (semi-confidently) that I am *not* batshit crazypants. My affliction is a bit more physiological....scratched cornea...AGAIN. Therefore, I am on a break from contacts but my eyes have been rather light-sensitive and I do not own a pair of these honkin' Roy Orbison shades. I swear, my eye doc is the nicest chick ever. She bestowed on me the "don't-be-cheap-and-wear-2 week-contacts-for-a-whole-month" lecture with the utmost tact, for the 2nd time. How she refrained from calling me a moron, I cannot fathom. But I swear...this reoccurence is not completely stemming from stupidity. It's this stubborn miserly old man streak in me that insists "What a racket!! They're perfectly fine to last ya a month!! Those Accuvue bastids are just trying to con you into spending more. A RACKET, I TELL YOU!!" It's weird how I can be like that. You'd think I lived through the dadburned Great Depression!!

Actually,my eye feels a good deal better today. I sustained the injury on Sunday --be it from a grain of airborne grit(my theory) or from a raggedy-ass contact lens. But I spent Sunday with my eye clamped shut with a cold wash cloth over it, drifting in and out of sleep. Monday , it wasn't feeling spectac. but I could manage to hold my eye open for 30 sec at a time, and I figured I should put in a full week before I take the week off next week (a trip to AZ-- yaaay!! More on that later..) so I worked that day. But then Tuesday I woke up, expecting to feel a smidge better, but the sunlight gave me a sharp pang of ouch right in the mid browbone and made me yelp "Oh FECK!!" And still, I got up and dressed with the intent of heading off to the office, but doing my hair in the mirror, I became increasingly dismayed that I still looked like Sloth from The Goonies, and maybe this won't clear up in time for my vaca, perhaps I should've seen the doctor on this? So I called in to work and went back to bed for 4 hours. And ya know, when I woke up again, I felt lots better. But I made the opthamologist appt. anyway. I got dye drops in my eye, the aforementioned lecture, and an RX for a li'l bottle of magic called Tobrimycin. It's antibiotics + steroids (for inflammation...me peeper was seriously inflamed. Incidentally, I am now waiting for someone to mildly perturb me so's I can TOTALLY UNLEASH HELL on 'em and then blame it on 'roid rage.) As soon as I got into my car in the Walgreens parking lot, I administered the first drop. Then, I looked in my rearview mirror and saw that the right side of face was streaked with rusty yellow rivulets--eye to jawline. I want to believe that this streaking came about immediately after the Tobrimycin drop, but I am not 100% sure. There is the chance that I went from the eye doc, across town, into Walgreens, consulted a pharmacist , sat in the store for 15 minutes, paid up & left, all while looking like my right eye was profusely seeping pus. Well, short story long, since Sunday I have been consistently hagged out and, at times, looking batshit crazypantsl I feel the need to rectify this sitch before I head west on Saturday. In a related news item, I am strongly compelled to buy a no-no.

So this is how my trip came about. ..

They told me at work that I had hit my roof for ETO accrual and would be losing it/ no longer earning if I didn't use some. So I just arbitrarily picked the week of May 9-16. I included that Monday the 16th so that I'd be returning to a short week of work...thusly diminishing (somewhat) the suckishness that is returning to work after vaca. It's the week after the first May pay day...so I guess not so arbitrary, that pick. Anyway, my time off was granted, but then the next day I started to dread the probability (the very probable probability) that I would fritter away my week off doing nothin' much. So, since I had a little nutmeat of my tax refund left, I thought--be un-Sandra-like and buy yourself a plane ticket!! The destination came to mind pretty quickly, as I have been promising my amiga out in Mesa AZ for about 10 yrs that I would...someday....eventually...one of these days...come visit her.

What I need to get crackin' on is some itinerary suggestions. Paula has asked me what I wanna do/ see, and rather than fall back on my usual passive M.O. ("Oooohhh, gee...I dunno. ..whatever you think would be fun") I'm gonna make with some actual, specific ideas. So far, I got Tombstone, and the Grand Canyon for my brilliant ideas. I gotta get some 'net-vestigations underway.

I have no good segue for this...but I was housesitting acouple weeks ago, and BOTH of the parakeets in my charge died. I have no good segue, because it hardly ties in with all my preceding news, but I had to include it in here somehow, because it was the funniest thing that happened to me lately. Oh, alright, YES-- I realize that makes me sound beaucoup insensitive, but dead parakeets just ARE funny. It's an empirical fact. I thought perhaps they died from me jinxing myself. Y'see...when I originally agreed to housesit for Peggy, there where 2 dogs to tend, along with 2 frogs, mail to fetch, and of course, the house to sit. But in the time between my consent to the gig and her departure for VA, she acquired 2 parakeets. I am renowned (in local circles) for being NOT a bird lover, and I proclaimed, when I learned of this new acquisition to Menagerie de Peggy "UGH. PARAKEETS. I'm just going to check them in the mornings to make sure they're not dead and then lob a handful of seed at their heads." Of course, I didn't do that, but just the mere mention of "dead" and "parakeets" in the same sentence might've triggered some bad hoodoo, y'know? Granted, my bird care regimen wasn't overly nurturing, but it was adequate. Every morning, about 10 min before leaving for work, I would get their water dish out that hangs on the side of the cage, give that a bit of a rinse, refill with new water. Then dump out their seed dish, and replace with new seeds. Other than that, I ignored them. I was vaguely aware of their horrid squickity-squwacking, but got adept at tuning them out. Peggy's notes said to "sing to them" and I did neglect to do that, but I'm not regretting that too mightily as I'm pretty sure that note was in jest and also pretty sure that my lack of crooning did NOT kill them. It may have even prolonged their life....who knows? As you mighta surmised, I didn't exactly bond with them... didn't even memorize their names actually. And so, on Thursday morning, when I saw the both of 'em laying (lying??) motionless on the bottom of the cage, I did the silliest thing. I shook the cage and I hollered , "Birds? BIRRRRDS!!!" I mean, that woulda been idiotic, even if I had known their given names (as if they'd spring up, all "What ho, guvnah? We was just havin' a bit of a snooze there..") but the fact that I didn't is just the perfect finishing touch of ridiculousness. I truly did feel awful about the two 'keets dropping dead (because this would make Peggy & her kid sad...because it would sully my rep as a top-notch housesitter) but, looking at it from outside the situation (and now, via a bit of hindsight) it just f-ing cracks my shit up. And so, I was dubbed a 'keet killer at the office...and many fun theories were bandied about (murder-suicide...CAGE match gone horribly wrong) Also I joked that I was going to dispose of the bods by feeding them to the dogs. Peggy has this ritual, when she feeds the doggies 2x daily, she doles out a little treat on top of their dry food-- a hard boiled egg, some bologna, etc. etc. (this is stupid... They --by and large--ignore their regular dog food. I feel certain that Caesar Milan would disapprove. I know the dude has his critics, but I think he knows his shit. But I digress...)So, here I was taxing myself, trying to dazzle the hounds with an exciting array of num-nums and suddenly I have 2 dead parakeets on my hands (it would have been cool if I'd had somebody like The Wolf to call, am I right?). Now that would be an exciting and different delicacy....

Actually, I was hoping, when I broke the news to Peggy, that she'd say something along the lines of "Oh, just put the cage outside, Kate's gonna wanna see them, have a burial or something" Now, I've met her kid, (Kate)and I didn't have a SERIOUS hope that she was going to really want to do something queer like that. I was just hoping to hear that because as much as I hate birds, dealing with dead birds is ESPECIALLY repugnant to me. But Peggy said to just throw 'em in the garbage. You should have seen THAT process. You think the Thurs a.m. discovery was idiotic. Well, I'd left 'em there all day, because I had to get to work. Well after I found out I'd have to dispose of the keets, I stole some gloves from work, earmarked especially for the chore. But then when I was about to actually do it, a thin layer of powder-free vinyl seemed an inadequate barrier betwixt my hand and a grody befeathered carcass. So, I had the brill. notion to employ Peggy's BBQ tongs. Not only does this eliminate actual bird -corpse contact, this also puts the corpse about a foot away from me. But then I thought... if I knew my grilling tools had touched dead bird, I'd have to discard them. So I took the top of the cage off, threw a little 6"x6" (approx) shroud of Saran Wrap over each birdie and scooped them up in that. And I lobbed them into a plastic shopping bag, double-tied that, and disposed of that bag in the garbage bag---all in a manner that suggested I was handling virulent toxic waste .

Hey, 2 out of three pet pairs survived the week. So I'm not THE WORST housesitter ever. Still, I count myself lucky that I have no dependents of any species to entrust to anyone while I'm in AZ. Surely karma would smite they asses...