Left of Center, off of the Strip.

Yeah, I know. I said I was back, and then I disappeared again, and then I showed up with that Wrinkle In Time-like post. Sorry 'bout that. I had a rather bizarre week last week, so bizarre in fact, that I could barely even put words to it. I kept wanted to post under the title WORST WEEK EVER but, it didn’t seem like such a good idea to tempt the fates that way. 

 

So, in case you're interested, here's the 140 max character version of last week:

• one of the kids overflowed a toilet upstairs and now there is shit water running down the wall in my kitchen. Awesome. 8:15 AM Jan 14th
• now the dog is puking. OF COURSE HE IS. 8:32 AM Jan 14th
• @soccerdad I'll tell you what I win. I win treating myself to the biggest, most froufrou Starbucks drink I can think of. 8:43 AM Jan 14th  in reply to soccerdad
• double shot this, betches. 8:44 AM Jan 14th
• one kid goes to school, the other gets to stay home & snuggle his superhot little body next to mine. Silver linings 7:43 AM Jan 15th
• Dear Universe: Seriously, UNCLE. just helped my husband push his stupid, dead, oil-leaking car off the driveway and onto the curb. GAH 10:10 PM Jan 15th

And then THIS week, while most people were all Hey! It’s Inauguration Day! At my house we were all, Huh, The Garage Door is Broken Day, and there goes another $250 out of my checkbook.  Sa-weet.

And now, 6 days later, the dealership still has my husband’s car, and they know it’s leaking oil from somewhere, but they can’t find the hole.  It’s become a CHALLENGE for the mechanic, they say.  Really? Because GETTING TO WORK has become a challenge, for us. But you know, whatever. Knock yourself out. Just fucking FIX IT.

Have I mentioned that my husband and I both work about 15 miles from home, in opposite directions?

Yeah. sigh.

Anyway, aside from all that drama, I am really hoping that this week is better. I mean, it started off well - it's the end of politics as we know it, right? We celebrated the end of The Bush Administration, and all the idiocy that goes with it. If I were going to use book titles to name Presidential Administrations, I'd call that one A Confederacy of Dunces. And the new one? The Stand. Because it ain't gonna be all balls and parades, my friends. It's gonna suck, for a long time. My hope is that this President, this Administration, will make it suck less than it could have been, and leave it getting better for the next one.

So I am excited for that. 

But, you probably don't care about that.  You're really wondering why I'm quoting Suzanne Vega, yes?

Well, I'll tell you.

The other component of this past week is that my friend The Old Christine found some pictures of us from elementary school, and posted them to her Facebook account and tagged me.  Nothing really weird of goofy, (which had to be hard to do, with me in them, but anyway...) but fun pictures of some kind of hayride outing we went on as a class, back in sixth grade. I have NO MEMORY of this event, at all. I am not even kidding. I have lots of memories of elementary school, most of them about how sucky it was, but not this one. Perhaps because nothing bad, embarrassing or goofy happened to me that day. (Again, not likely.)

I was a weird kid, y'all.  And elementary school is hard on weird kids. It got better as I got older and kind of accepted who I was, and where I fit in on the foodchain, and made friends with the other weirdos.  And then I did better as the high school years kicked in, because as I got older I sort of grew out of my obscene weirdness, and was only mildly weird.  I got contacts, and had my braces removed, and learned how to wear makeup, and how to make my bangs pouf as high as possible using Sebastian Spritz (which I cannot find a google image of, but COME ON, I know you all remember that stuff!) Other kids had a difficult puberty and life got tougher for them in high school, but puberty was pretty good to me, as I kind of grew into myself, in a way.  The thing is, once you establish a place on the foodchain, you don't exactly move up.  You just get tolerated more by the folks higher than you. Which was really fine with me anyway, not like I wanted to be a coke-snorting cheerleader with my own special colored straw.

 

(Welcome to the burbs. In the 80’s. At the same school my kids will be attending! Hahahahahahha, oh shit.)

Anyway.

This working with teenagers thing is really interesting. And I mean that in a good way. It's fun, they are all good kids.  But the oddest thing has been happening to me from being around them.  I'm having all these flashbacks to when I was in school.  Tonight over dinner the discussion became about what they are reading in class (or trying not to read, as it were), and I started remembering all the things that I read in English class. The Shakespeare was good, for me anyway. A Separate Peace was bad.  Although recently I've heard that some of the fundie freaky-freakies are trying to get it removed from high school reading lists because of the homosexuality, and I was all, Wha? Totally didn't catch that, personally, I just thought it sucked because it was boring. BORING. If I’d known it was all about the innuendo of gay love it would have been much more interesting a read.

So all of this is a long way around telling you why that ski story memory that popped into my brain the other night while driving home from the youth group at the church, and so I came home, kissed my kids goodnight, and then furiously typed away on the laptop to get it all out for you.

 

You’re Welcome.  We now go back to our regularly scheduled posting about Bizarre and Expensive Repairs at My Home.