Move Now, White Cow

On the way to work this morning, I crested a hill and saw THIS:

Of course, because of the Law of Murphy, she was in a little depression. Not the kind that might make Bossy cut herself, or put her head in the oven, or give away her ear tag and her cud. The kind that's a low area with a rise behind it. I had a choice of going into the lane of oncoming traffic to take my chances with the Mystery Vehicle of Death that might be on the other side, or giving Bossy a crash course in Newton's Second Law of Motion. Since Bossy didn't look to be a sciency kind of gal, I gave the old heifer a wide berth, then gassed my Tahoe back into my own lane. Chaos was avoided.

This is the country. It is only neighborly to seek out the cattle baron and inform him that his fortune is trickling down the road. At 7:00 a.m. on the way to work, neighborliness flies out the window. At forty-five miles per hour. I did not want to be late. Twenty-one freshmen are a terrible thing to leave unattended. It's not like this guy lives next door. He's a three-mile neighbor. We wave when he's driving his tractor down the road, or when his wife parks their truck to stop traffic while herding the cattle to another pasture. I did not feel comfortable cruising up their driveway and knocking on the door at that hour. So Bossy was left to her own devices.

On the way home, I saw a cow-sized spot on the road across from where Bossy had planted herself this morning. I hope there was no carnage. The pavement didn't look bloody. Just wet. Perhaps Bossy battles incontinence, and can't watch the commercials with pipe people and class reunion balloons for pharmaceuticals to correct her problem. Because she's a cow. She has no TV. Much less a phone to call in her prescription, or a ride to town to visit her bovinatrician or bovinecologist.

Surely there would have been raw leather all over the thoroughfare if Bossy had met her demise. There was no evidence of cowhide or cow hair or car shards. I can't help but feel guilty for not trying to notify someone. Imagine how Bossy's four stomachs might have dropped at the sight of a more reckless driver. One who likes to play chicken with road cows.

I've got to stop beating myself up. I can't act as Cow Police for the whole world, you know.

Visual Acuity is in the Eye of the Beholder

Remember my post last week, Blind. Leading the. ? Sure you do. Play along. Because today I'm reliving it.

The Pony and I left school and motored our way toward town. Something caught my eye on the grassy right shoulder area. It was a maroon chair. At first, it looked like a recliner. Then I say that it was a 1970s style overstuffed maroon number. With white stuffing escaping from the right arm. The Pony saw it, too.

Hey! That was a chair!

Uh huh. It wasn't there this morning.

Who would throw a chair out along the road?

Who would throw a refrigerator, a portable meth lab, a truckload of tree trimmings, a mattress, and a washing machine out along the road? We've had those things tossed on our road.

Yeah. But that chair didn't have anything wrong with it.

What? It had stuffing hanging out!

No it didn't.

Listen, Mr. Skunk Is A Puppy, Blanket Is A Skunk. I am telling you that as sure as my Windshield Beetle eyes can see, that chair was no good!

All right. But that was no beetle on the windshield.

Society can only hope that The Pony and I are never called as witnesses in a criminal trial.

You Have a Different Scenario, Perhaps?

I have been a bit under the weather this weekend, with a back-to-school virus. I am usually able to  avoid the first sickness, but both my boys brought it home. I set out for some hot-and-sour soup this afternoon in an effort to ease my symptoms.

Like John Travolta as Bud in Urban Cowboy told Aunt Corene after he broke his arm down at the plant, when Sissy had run off with Wes, the ex-con mechanical-bull controller, "Cornbread tastes real good when you're hurtin'," right after Aunt Corene said, "Y'all live like pigs!" and made some individual tuna salads with onion instead of with apples and pecans, the way Sissy liked it...hot-and-sour soup tastes real good when you've got a cold.

Little did I know that I would have to wait twenty-five minutes for my hot-and-sour soup. That's uncalled for. Seriously. There were only three customers. I ordered my take-out soup. Then an eating-in couple ordered General Tso's Chicken and Chicken and Broccoli with a side of hot-and-sour soup. They got their side soup before I got mine. Five minutes before. So they only waited twenty minutes.

You would think that little gal hopped on a slow boat to China, wrestled a wizened Panda for the bamboo shoots, then planted the soybeans and waited for them to grow, harvested them, curdled the soy milk, pressed it into blocks, cut it into cubes, then trekked through a forest to forage for mushrooms, then hatched a chicken from its egg, raised it with love, chopped off its head, boiled it, poured off the broth, gathered all ingredients, hopped another slow boat back from China, set the fixin's on the counter, and waited for the teenage boy to finish his video game before ordering him to make the soup.

At least that's the scenario that passed through my mind while I coughed up my right lung waiting for my soup.

Motel at the Corner of Femur and Tibia

I have mice. Joint mice. Flaky pieces of cartilage that have abandoned the ol' meniscus ship to float freely within my sea of synovial fluid.

The problem with joint mice is that you never know when they will manifest themselves. One minute they're all cartoon cute, wearing little red shorts, white gloves, and yellow shoes, courting a lady mouse in a big pink bow with a bouquet of bright flowers...and the next minute they're jamming little mouse potatoes into the tailpipe of my knee joint, and two-fistedly gnawing on nerves they envision to be tasty wedges of cheddar cheese.

The transformation occurs without warning. I think I'm going to take a step forward, and my knee locks up with the bonus of a shooting pain. After a few limps, the pain might go away. Or it might linger for several weeks. And that's with the good knee. Not the good one who tries to persuade the bad one that it's wrong to toss a dummy off a highway overpass to cause a chain reaction auto accident, like Elijah Wood tried to persuade Macaulay Culkin in The Good Son. No. The good one, as in the knee which has not gone under the knife.

I can generally pacify the joint mice with a snap of cold weather to their insular community behind the patella, at the corner of femur and tibia. An ice pack every evening makes them somewhat tractable. I am not ready to evict the little vermin with a surgical procedure. Too bad an orange-striped cat is not an option. Nor a sticky-floored joint mouse motel.

I guess I'm going to have to live with them.

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Loomed

Is this a sign of the apocalypse?

My lilac bush is blooming. That is not a euphemism for something improper. My actual front-yard lilac bush has sprouted several blossoms. When I looked out the front window, I thought some trash had blown onto the bush. Or perhaps a crafty giant arachnid had ensconced some limbs with webs. I sent Hick out to investigate on his way to the barn. I sent The Pony to take a picture with his phone.

Never have I ever seen lilacs bloom in September. They're an April kind of treat in these here parts. I'm giving props to the goats who stood on their hind legs to devour my lilacs and limbs and shoots and leaves. Or perhaps to Hick, who wrapped a limb with duct tape in an effort to prevent me from noticing that his caprine kids had broken a big branch.

 

Still. This does not seem normal.

The rest of the earth is scorched and parched. Temperatures have soared into the high nineties for weeks. But something set my lilacs to blooming. It's the bush that Hick dug up from my grandma's yard. The bush that took seven years to bloom. From the grandma who passed away last September.

Wardrobe Malfunction of the Third Kind

The tale you are about to read was jogged from my repressed memory museum on Sunday, when I popped in to read Tammy's Message in a Bloggle and see what she had percolating in her weekly Improper Poll.

Let's get the ground rules out of the way first. In Val's terminology, wardrobe malfunctions are classified thus:

Wardrobe Malfunction of the First Kind - a wardrobe malfunction is spotted on another person at a distance of 500 yards or less. Such as when the job counselor at the unemployment office wears one brown shoe and one black shoe to work.


Wardrobe Malfunction of the Second Kind - physical traces of a wardrobe malfunction are found. Like when you find a pair of panties in the wastebasket in the Sonic bathroom, and surmise, "There's one pair of undies that is not going to be creeping up the wearer's crack anymore."

Wardrobe Malfunction of the Third Kind - when a person actually comes in contact with her own wardrobe malfunction. See below.

Many years ago, shortly after the birth of my youngest son, I was attacked by my own gallbladder. It was quite a painful ordeal, necessitating my slow-speed rush from the classroom by way of my aunt's Lincoln Town Car to a local emergency room. A nurse without protective gloves jabbed me for a blood sample and created a crimson Old Faithful at my inner elbow. Results in hand, as well as ON hands, shoes, and white pants, she started an IV of saline solution while the doctor on duty figured out what to do with me.

Because the ER was ER only, I needed transport to a full-service hospital. I was advised that I could wait for the ambulance to return to the upper reaches of the county and scoop me up, or I could travel by private vehicle. The ambulance might take a couple of hours, but I could leave in the IV and have pain meds in it. Private vehicle would be quicker, but the IV would have to be removed and re-started at the hospital. Oh, and no pain meds until I was evaluated at New Hospital.

Perhaps you have not had the misfortune of gallbladder auto-assault. It is quite unpleasant. The pain is worse than childbirth. Worse than a broken bone. Worse than a torn cartilage. In the back of my mind, I knew that the offending organ had to be removed. So I did not see any benefit in lolling about waiting for my sirened carriage to haul me to New Hospital. Hick had arrived from work, and decreed that he would drive me. I signed out somewhat against medical advice to hightail it to the full-service hospital.

Bear with me. I'm getting to the wardrobe malfunction.

They were expecting me at New Hospital. I was quickly gowned, and an IV and pain pump were installed on my left forearm. The nurse was impressed by my pain tolerance, what with my amylase levels being too high to schedule surgery. According to her, most people with that level were not walking around, coherent. But enough bragging about my superior bullet-biting pain threshold. I was assigned a bed so I could hurry up and wait for the amylase levels to fall into a surgically acceptable range. At least that's how I understood it. But then again, I was on a Demerol pump. So for all I know, Captain Unicorn rocked me in a porch swing under the rainbow until the owie went away.

An ultrasound was ordered to discern whether the gallstones might pass and put the kibosh on that whole surgery scenario. The nurse told me to make sure I was only wearing the hospital gown, and made a hasty exit. Which was kind of a problem, because in our haste, we had slapped on that gown with my bra still in place. My plan was to take off that bra and slip it through the gown sleeve and off the end of my arm. The arm which was attached by two tubes to a metal IV tree on wheels, by way of a bag of saline solution and a wonderful narcotic-on-demand box.

I was a gamer. I finagled that bra loose, even though I had to use my right, non-tethered arm to unhook it single-handedly. A task usually done with my left hand. Then I was stumped. There was no way that bra was going to slip over those mediciny obstacles and that metal stand. I thought it through like a chimpanzee contemplating which twig to use as a termite fork. I would have to slide the bra down my arm, over the two tubes, and up or down that metal stand. It was worse than a Chinese ring puzzle. Oh, how I wished for a chimpanzee to show me what to do. But there were none in my wing of the hospital. Go figure.

The sensible thing to do would have been to ring the nurse with the call button, and tell her my predicament. Which would have meant either taking out the tubes at my inner elbow and thumb-wrist area, and then reinserting them after the recalcitrant bra had been removed...or using scissors to snip the offending undergarment off my arm. I do not fear needles. But I had no desire to incur a fifth and sixth stabbing of the day.

So I did what any sane woman with a bra malfunction and a squirt of Demerol every fifteen minutes would have done, and I chewed through the plastic ring thingy that held the strap to the bra proper. No removable strap looped through a slotted doodad for my bra. Nope. The end of the strap was stitched tighter than sixteen-year-old boy's eyebrow after a collision with a gym wall.

Yep. I destroyed one of my favorite bras rather than undergo two more skin punctures. And I saw no need to announce the predicament to the nurse in order to allow her to cut through Brazilla with a pair of tape scissors. It was only fitting that I sever Brazilla myself.

Which was a Wardrobe Malfunction of the Third Kind, orchestrated by a Demerol-addled Val.

Kyocera Lays the Smack Down on Mother Teresa

I tried to get away right after school today. Right after the fifteen minutes that we are required to loiter around the halls keeping students from loitering in the halls. All of my grading was complete. I had whipped up a test using my new textbook test generator. But the confounded thing had not printed correctly on my desktop HP inkjet. I searched the printers available. They can't have regular names like Two Doors Down, or Work Room. They have names that can be recited as serial numbers in case they fall into the wrong hands. Mine, for example, is HP 940C. One year I had to turn him off, because folks from far and near were monopolizing him, soaking up the ink which I paid for by the sweat of my own brow. Apparently, kids were trying to print, dashing to the lab, not finding their 400-page document from which they needed a two-sentence quote, and going back to hit print again.

I needed a different printer so the eclipse diagrams on my test would come out with all parts readable. I think little HP 940C was low on ink. So I took a chance on a license-plate-number of a printer, by process of elimination, and attempted to print a single page of seven vocabulary words, headed by the title of my current chapter. In hindsight, perhaps I should have merely tried to print a single word, testing, and checked for my resultant copy in the teacher workroom. But no.

The Pony had arrived, so I sent him hoofing it up to the workroom to see if my copy had been spit out by big bad Kyocera. He returned forthwith, and replied that not only was my page nonexistent, but that Kyocera said, "Clear paper jam."

Of course that set my cold, cold heart to palpitating. Because as any teacher knows, even though you are the one who jammed the copier, you don't want any evidence to point to you. Evidence like a ripped-up page bearing the subject matter of your class. It doesn't matter that a mouse crawled in after the bell and was crushed by the moving parts, and your paper had nothing to do with the malfunction. YOU WILL BE BLAMED for it in the morning, when your colleagues stand four abreast with last-minute, must-have originals in their hands, gazing balefully at the cantankerous Kyocera.

I made a beeline for the workroom. Ever-helpful master-copier Kyocera mentored me like a wise elder. No less than eleven problem areas were flashing on his brain. I followed the directions to a T. "Open front door." Yeah. Kyocera has to be quite literal with us faculty simpletons. I turned and flipped and opened and closed and pulled and yanked and peered and sighed. After clearing five of the flashing arrow areas, I gave up. Because those papers contained material from a class that was not mine. Nobody was gonna trace this malfunction to moi!

Wasn't that selfless of me? To partially clear the copier jam, even though somebody else was responsible for clogging Kyocera? Let me answer for you, "Yes, Val. That was selfless. You are a regular Mother Teresa. Just like the mom of one of your cronies purported several years ago. Even though she had never met nor spoken with you."

I laid the twisted, tattered shreds of the two papers on top of Kyocera. Just in case anybody was wondering who broke the copier.

And in case that was not even the copier my page was sent to, somebody is sure to drag that sheet to my room tomorrow and ask if it's mine. Then I'll know the name and location of another copier. The Even Steven reward for my half-a-good-deed today.