a sad daisy chain of events
Friday, may. 16, 2008 | 0 comments
I had kind of an awful day yesterday! First off, we got home from Fontanelle’s (awesome! sweet! pretty!) debut rock show at about 1am the night before, which was pretty late on the work-night scale, so we went straight to bed, no chit-chat.
But unfortunately Daisy the dog had somehow, while we were otherwise off rocking, lucked her way into a barrel of peanuts that we had…tucked away in some closet somewhere? Not sure. All we know is that when Daisy stopped her wee-hour pacing and worrying and whining long enough to barf spectacularly in the corner, the puddle she produced was chock full of nuts.
Daisy then moved her sad self over to the front door, which I took as a hint that she very much needed to go outside. So, even though it was still dark out, I assembled an sweatpanty outfit and trudged outside and watched sympathetically while she hunched into her shitting pose and unleashed a toxic Whoosh of unhappiness. Ridding her system of that hot mess left her quite a bit perkier, though, and as she trotted back upstairs, she seemed almost human again.
After me and my fuzzy two-hours-of-sleep head filled up on coffee, lots and lots of coffee, Daisy and I went out for our regular AM walk, and she was her normal, darting, perk-eared self. As we we rounded the first corner, I whipped out my cellyphone and to give Marco a call. I started to leave him a message about how Daisy seemed completely recovered from her peanuttle debacle, and I had just finished saying the words, “She probably won’t need to go to the vet…” when the dog on the third house in, the one that Daisy has engaged in many a screaming match in the past, threw her body at the fence surrounding the house. Daisy did not hesitate. She ramped right up to defcon 11 and lurched herself at the other side of the fence. I’m not exactly sure what happened next because it all went down so fast (and I was on the phone, hello?), but I think the neighbor dog had learned herself a new trick, one involving the ability to squeeze her sharp jaws out through one of the cracks in the fence. And Daisy got one look at those snarled open jaws and decided the best idea was to attack them with her nose. So suddenly the world was this armageddon of dog screams and blood. Blood! Splashing! Everywhere! Me, in a sluggy panic, at Marco’s voicemail: “Uh, let me call you back.”
I hung up and stood there for a few milliseconds, unsure quite what to do. I knew what I wanted to do, which was throw up everywhere, but instead I took a few uncertain steps forward, pulled by the soothing momentum of our normal walk pattern, but then I woke up and realized we needed to get back home, like stat. So I shakily turned us around, and shakily run-walked toward home, with Daisy trotting happily along and seeming none the worse for wear, aside from periodic gore-spattering head shakes. So we got home and I hustled her into the bathroom and swabbed down her face with a wet washcloth to reveal? One itty bitty wound the size of a pinprick on the tip of her nose. Dink! She was totally fine, in smiling-good health even.
The bleeding had stopped, but I didn’t want her roaming around the house and rubbing open her nick on the furniture. Also it was hot yesterday, like almost 100 degrees already, so I thought maybe the cool, non-direct-sunlit and also very large bathroom might be a good place for her? So I moved her bed and water bowl into the bathroom, and she immediately curled up and seemed totally content. And so I went to work! (By way of a visit to the neighbor, whom I introduced myself to and explained what happened and made sure their dog was okay and he was very nice, etc.).
But when I got to work, I started obsessing over the idea that Daisy would start re-bleeding somehow, and maybe the bleeding wouldn’t stop this time, and maybe she needed to go to the vet, after all? So I left Marco a series of fun messages, and finally he got back into range and was able to call me back, and it was agreed that he’d leave work early and go home and see what needed what-ing.
An hour later, he called in with a report. “She’s fine. If you hadn’t told me what happened, I’d never have known she’d been injured. The bathroom door, on the other hand…” Apparently poor Daisy had spent the bulk of the morning trying to claw her way out of the cool, relaxing bathroom. And when Marco walked in, her smiling face was covered with paint chips, like a kid covered in brownie, all, “Hi!” and “What?”
In short, I make bad decisions and also am not responsible enough to own small animals, and I should just forget about having children. Tada!
Daisy smiles a “what nose wound?” smile as the polydactyl Marbles lounges above (slap me seven!), both more or less de-boned by the heat of the big Bay Area heatwave of 08.
Caroleen and Sunny of Fontanelle touch the soft spot in all of us on a warm San Franciscan night.
a future bright with new shoes, clean teeth, and gentle rocking!
Wednesday, may. 14, 2008 | 0 comments
Top three things that are making my happy even happier today:
1. My new spring-sprongy yellow slingbacks, which I purchased this Sunday in the heat of a dire wardrobe misstep (toasty combination of boots and socks and tucked-in pants) brought on by the weather, which started out cold, so cold but then traitorously transformed into a hot, sunny day? We were counties from home and had an hour to kill, so I hotfooted it into Macy’s, where I spied the lovely yellow things, which I’d been actively coveting for weeks after seeing them in action on both another Wardrobe Remixer and one of my favorite online reads. So I snapped them up and wore them the hell out of there, my boot-pruned piggies sighing happily all the way home.
2. Brushing my teeth in the shower. Go ahead! Scrub and froth with impunity! For you have no clothing to worry about tainting with those irascible white spots! Also, it’s strangely cozy?
3. Fontanelle, the new musical offering (which I happen to know features some sort of prerecorded “beats” and “loops”) from my favorite Sunny and Caroleen of Waycross, is unfurling its magicality tonight at the Hemlock in San Frisco! Come on down and sip sippables with me at the bar! I’ll be the one with the notably attractive yellow shoes, and shower-fresh teeth.
I brake for white russians
Monday, may. 12, 2008 | 0 comments
Oh what a weekend! Like all great weekends, things started way back on Thursday, when Maggie and I got totally souffléd in North Beach. It was a fluffy, bubbly, chatter-packed night, with many revelations and self-reflections and hour-long asides and explosive point-making and self-shhing and waiter-teasing and maybe some champagne? All of which I paid for dearly with many alcohol-rattled hours tossing and moaning on the couch deep into the night, followed by a dim, hung-overcast morning. I wasn’t really right again until around noon the next day, thanks to a bacon and cheddar cure-all eggwich miracle with side of Coke, holy shit. When I came text-moaning to Maggie with anti-champagne “never again“s that next day, she suggested that maybe the White Russian on an empty stomach, which I ordered at Tosca before our evening really even got started, was to blame? Oh, yes, well. I suppose there’s a personal domino theory in there somewhere.
I went on to sleep the sleep of the almost-dead for 12 whole hours on Friday night, so great, then we woke up and went straight to the gym, of all places. I trained elliptically for about 20 minutes, then I moved on to the weights where I seriously burnt my dark meat, working my wings and thighs beyond all sense. I even got myself onto the skanky inner-thigh machine, which is always just one lingering eye contact away from sexual intercourse, Perfect-style. The singe deepened to a universal, please don’t make me laugh soreness on Sunday, and now today it’s even worse—I feel bruised, like someone battered me with a pillowcase filled with oranges, Grifters-style, or even a pillowcase filled with soda, Bad Boys-style. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but it kind of seems like the gym is trying teach me a lesson? A lesson about never going to the gym ever again?
Other weekend highlights include: BBQing for hours and hours in honor of Caroleen’s birthday along with so many long-lost pals (Amy P. and Julie P.! Marilyn in from Boson! Heidi out of Heiding!), visiting my dad (who is doing much better despite a general sense of unease over his still-undiagnosed inability to exercise without feeling like he’s going to have a heart failure, an issue that I personally would celebrate and use as an excuse for never gyming again (read above), but which makes him very sad since he actually loves exercising, crazy I know), Indian fooding with my mom, brainstorming over what we’d name our brake shop if Marco and I were to own our own brake shop (tie between Sir Francis Brake’s and Stop Your Squealing), emergency shoe-shopping for emergency happiness-yellow slingbacks, and even getting myself seriously banged up.
Now that the weekend’s all over, I feel very tired and droopy, like I need a weekend from my weekend. I guess someone’s got a case of the Mondays! Office Space-style! PS, something I’ve been disturbed to discover since going undercover in corporate USA is that office workers now actively quote Office Space, meaning that if they were to make Office Space today, the grim coworkers would be chirping Office Space quotes—all “TPS reports” this and “flare” that—in lieu of the “TGIF“s and “happy Humpdays” of simpler, gentler yors. And, as it turns out, nothing makes a person feel more like she’s at work than meta irony.
childhood rememories to magnet onto the refrigerator of your soul!
Sunday, may. 11, 2008 | 0 comments
I’ve had these two thematically similar nostaligigreat internet finds tumbling around in my brain for weeks now, getting shinier and smoother with every passing day. Look! How great!
First, we have these photographic reenactments of childhood drawings (via Lisa), which are so very beautiful and weird and dare I say…Japanese? But with…Russian text everywhere? Yeah, I don’t get it. But I love it! (Marco says they also remind him of the Monster Engine…oh yeah!)
And second, there is this deeply cheering and yay-ful dancigraphic reenactment of childhood and also Huey Lewis (via Marilyn and also Maggie).
Don’t they both make you feel a little warmer, and brighter, and like this maybe world of ours is going to be okay?
heartstrings
Tuesday, may. 6, 2008 | 0 comments
Another UPDATE: As of Friday, my dad’s back at home, feeling better but with his ailments still more or less undiagnosed. We’re all very relieved that he won’t be needing surgery, but the looming odyssey of medicinal trial-and-erroring as the doctors try to figure out what’s wrong and, more importantly, how to solve it, is maybe a little bit anxious-making? Hm. In any case…onward and upward. Right?
UPDATE: So my dad had his angiogram yesterday (it was scheduled for 11:30 but he didn’t go in until 7, which as you may know is a lot, lot, lot of the longest kind of hours, especially for my dad who wasn’t allowed to eat or drink the whole day, fun). The good news is that they didn’t spot anything more than a few moderate problems with his arteries, so there seems to be no need for another bypass, which is great! But there’s still the little matter of figuring out what’s behind his failed treadmill test and the heart pains, the shortness of breath, the professor and Mary Ann…So! He’s still in the hospital while they run more tests. And I’m back at work, wondering and waiting and eating my weight in cookies, huzzah?
So I just got word that my pop’s in the hospital with heart woes again, after having his triple bypass eight years ago. They’re pretty sure it’s only going to be a matter of going in (through his thigh!) to do a little angioplasty angiogram, and maybe add a shunt (or is it a stint? stent (thanks, Karen!)), and they’re very optimistic, like 98% so (hospitals like the percentages, and as far as percentages go, that’s a good one!), that it’s just going to be an in-and-out one-day procedure, nothing too scary at all. And when my dad arrived at the hospital (via ambulance, not at all fun, bleh), there were two other guys lined up in the heart room, both having had heart surgery a number of years before, just like my dad, and now back in the hospital with shortness of breath and heart pains, just like my dad. So it’s more common than you’d think, more like a garden snake than the rattler it could be.
So it’s all very much in “it could be much worse”-ville, but still I reacted not so swimmingly to the news. I was at work, in a meeting, and got back to my desk to find a number of messages from my stepmother, who never ever calls unexpectedly. So, with that sinking “unexpected call” feeling, I called her back and got all the details and was totally fine and sane. And then I went back to my desk and…sudden showers! It was like when you hit your head on a dumb cupboard door that you yourself left open and abruptly burst into tears, not so much because it hurts, even if it does very much hurt, but because it surprised you? And you’re also frustrated with yourself for being so dramatic, and that frustration makes you cry some more?
If you’ve worked in corporate culture, and have weak eyes, then maybe you know the particular awfulness that is sitting in your small, grey, sound-porous cube and snuffling very, very quietly, because more than anything, you don’t want your coworkers to notice that something’s wrong because then you’d have to talk about it, and when you’re only just managing to keep it together, nothing opens those floodgates worse than having to talk about it.
And then! After work, walking to the bus stop, I kept freaking myself out like you do after watching a scary movie, where without really trying you can transform an innocent, early evening trip downstairs to get the mail into this harrowing, heart-beat drum solo of self-manufactured fear. I kept imaging worse-case scenarios and then feeling sorry for myself over these imagined scenarios, and then I’d get all weepy and snortly all over again.
But yes. Anyway. I’ve taken the day off work. I’ve lined myself up with a Zipcar for the whole day so I can drive myself to the hospital and eat hospital pudding from the hospital cafeteria and give my dad some high-fives and listen to the doctors tell those weird flat jokes that they always seem to tell, and everything is going to be totally fine.