Sinking to a new low
I remember back in my bar days (pre-children and real life responsibilities) how difficult it was sometimes to land my rear end properly on the toilet after having lost my balance due to too much alcohol. Even though I'm in better shape than I was back then, I seem to be having the same problem lately - WITHOUT having had a single drink - whenever I use the bathroom at my office.
I don't know WHY the commodes in the ladies' room are so low-to-the-ground. After all, quite a few women wear high heels, making them even taller than they usually are. Why place the toilets so the seat is a mere 1.5 feet off the floor? The edge of the bowl doesn't even hit the backs of my knees when I'm standing in front of it. This results in some extremely slow and cautious maneuvering so that I actually land on the damn thing when lowering myself down. I keep waiting to hear the toilet start making the "beep beep beep" noise that accompanies trucks when they shift into reverse.
This is why I end up using the handicapped stall whenever it's empty. At least THAT toilet is placed higher up. I'll bet few things could be more embarrassing to a property management company than having to rescue a physically challenged person from a toilet.
Phew, that was a close one
Turns out my front driver side tire was very bad. I know this because Joe, my brother-in-law, used the car Friday night to get to the store and as he was returning home, the tire blew. Not just fizzled to a flat...it BLEW. He was only moving at about 20mph, and still had trouble moving it out of the way of traffic to the side of the road.
I tend to drive much faster, of course, and have about a 40-mile commute from my job in New York - and generally, depending on the route I take, at least 35 of those miles are on the highway. So I figure it's only through pure luck that that sucker didn't blow out as I was clocking along at 60mph only a couple of hours earlier.
Not only did Joe get the car home without damaging the rim, the next morning he devoted several of his Saturday hours to changing the tire (to what unfortunately turned out to be only a donut spare), and then driving to Town Fair Tire and having them put two new front tires on (good thing he was there too - they tried to skip the "balancing" part of the procedure, and they would have managed to skip it had it been me standing there). Apparently the TFT technician was appalled by the state of my other front tire as well, and asked "Doesn't she ever check these?" to which Joe said he replied, "Pfft. Gas. Drive. That's her." They had a good laugh over this one.
In any case, not only was I not killed on the highway on the trip home, but I now have two brand-new front tires on my car (which withstood a truly nasty pothole on my trip to work this morning). If my husband had been the one to do all this for me, I'd STILL be hearing about what I owe him for doing it. As is usual for him, however, he wasn't even out of bed until 2pm Saturday, by which time Joe had been home from his post-tire-replacement trip to the store for two hours.
Thank you Joe!
Maybe OLD dogs can't learn new tricks...
...but there's still some hope for the puppies.
I was pretty depressed yesterday, and it lasted well into today. The cause of this wallow was, as it is so often, the overgrown 43-year-old five-year-old to whom I'm married.
My kids who were out of school for Columbus Day. I had put in for a vacation day, having anticipated their request for me to stay home, since they prefer me to do so whenever possible. This is because their father doesn't find life congenial, and prefers to spread the misery around so nobody feels left out. Fortunately, he slept most of the day away as he always does when I'm home, so we managed to enjoy a fairly quiet environment until 3pm or so. That's when it all went downhill.
Samantha, my older daughter, has soaked up a lot of her father's behavior patterns. She tends to yell first and ask questions later. Between the two of them, it's easy to believe one is under constant attack. Yesterday, my tolerance for this crap evaporated, especially after having been called a few choice names by my (hopefully future ex-) husband. I briefly escaped by taking a trip to the laundromat (our washing machine recently breathed its last and hasn't yet been replaced), but while I was there had to endure yet another spousal diatribe by cell phone, a modern convenience that is not without its drawbacks. As is true in many instances, with one hand technology giveth, with the other it taketh away.
In any case, at the end of a long day full of incidents that made me feel like a substandard member of the species, I was sniffling to myself on the couch. Samantha arrived home from a friend's house, and actually indicated concern...a rare occurrence. I explained that I was tired of being spoken to as if I were worthless. Amazingly, she has since been offering me food, chatting with me, performing the tasks I ask her to do, and in general acting the way a child should, at least in my fantasy life.
I'm not sure how long it will last, but at least now I have hope that maybe she can be taught. The old dog, though...the only hope I have there is that he'll either become a stray or otherwise permanently exit my life. I don't see it happening due to any effort on his part, but I did think of a great analogy today...forget the dog thing, he's much more like a toxic waste dump. One doesn't wait for the dump to move - one packs up one's stuff, and of course one's several children, and hightails it for safer, less oozy ground.
Time to leave the Love Canal. Anybody wanna help me with a plan of escape?
