So this afternoon, I take Gracie to the park for her walk prior to picking up Thing 2 from school.
I pull in to the parking lot, which is pretty empty except for one truck. Gracie and I head off to chase geese and squirrels attend to some bathroom habits. And I don't mean both of us were chasing squirrels and geese and dropping a deuce. Only I did.
KIDDING!
After our walk, in which we were chased by geese (the geese at the park are badass and they scare me) and chased some squirrels and Gracie did her business in the middle of the road (she has this thing against doing a #2 on grass) we head back to the car.
The parking lot is still mostly empty except for a car that arrived while we were out on our walk.
And because there were 100 million empty parking spots, OF COURSE the car owner would park here:
You can even see that this is a mostly empty parking lot so why, WHY would this driver decide to park RIGHTNEXT to my car? Why not one parking spot over, leaving an empty one between us?
I have parked at the side of the road inside the park and have been the only car parked at the side of the road and someone will come and park 3" from my back bumper. For reals. There's 1/2 mile of empty roadside in front of me but nope, they have to park on my bumper.
I'll go to a shopping center and deliberately park in the North 40 so that I wouldn't have to deal with a Parking Space Invader and yet they still find me.
Back when I still had my Ford Excursion (a really, really big SUV), I had gone somewhere and made sure to park far enough away to ensure that the dreaded Parking Space Invader wouldn't find me. They did. Two of them. One on either side of me and so close were they to my door that the only way I could get into my vehicle was by crawling in the back window.
I was discussing the behavior of the Parking Space Invader with someone and wondered why the PSI does this and the other person said they thought people do it as an unconscious "safety in numbers" thing.
That may be but I think the real reason people do it is because they're clueless assholes.
Bad things tend to happen on February 15. Usually related to events of The Day Before, aka "Valentine's Day."
On year, it was on February 15 when I discovered, via the grapevine, that My One True Love had given an expensive piece of jewelry to someone for Valentine's Day and that someone was Not Me. Which is how I found out that My One True Love was a lying, cheating Rat Bastard.
It was another February 15 when I woke up after a wonderful Valentine's celebration the night before with my long-time boyfriend to discover he had flown the coop in the middle of the night, although he did take the gentlemanly step of leaving a "Dear Jane" letter on the pillow.
So, every year, I have to wonder/worry about something Bad happening on February 15.
This year has been no exception.
This morning, my mother-in-law died after a 10 year battle with Alzheimer's. A battle in which Alzheimer's robbed her of her dignity and turned her into the equivalent of an adult-size infant, an infant who could be out the door and halfway down the street the moment your back was turned.
Instead of mourning her death, we're going to try to remember the person she once was, before that bastard known as the Alzheimer's became such a dickhead and we're celebrating that she is finally Free.
Once upon a time, in the early stages of our romantic romance, I decided I was going to cook a pot roast for TheManTheMyth because he is a meat-and-potatoes type of guy and I thought, "what could be more romantic than a home-cooked meal?"
So I get out a cookbook, called "Square Meals" and there's a recipe for pot roast with a picture. And I ask my sister, who is an awesome cook, for help. She tells me to get something called a 7-bone roast and even draws me a picture of what it should look like and sends me off to the supermarket.
Where I proceed to stand if front the of the meat counter looking hopelessly dazed and confused. I don't see anything called a 7-bone roast. I see plenty of other roasts: rump roasts, tri-tip roasts, standing rib roasts which did have several bones in it but not 7 of them and even something called a Bone-in Chuck Roast but I don't see anything with 7 bones in it.
So I go back home and tell my sister that the supermarket doesn't sell anything with 7 bones in it, which sends her into peals of laughter and she takes me back to the store, picks up the Bone-in Chuck roast, holds it up to the picture she had drawn and waddya know? They match! Who knew?
We get the rest of the ingredients and go home and I cook a pot-roast, which did not come out looking ANYTHING close to the picture in the cookbook, which actually looked more like this
even though that recipe actually did call for a chuck roast. Way to really confuse me, people.
I don't remember how it turned out, probably not that great because I? am not known for my culinary expertise, is what I'm saying.
I'm sure you're thinking this post has to do with Valentine's Day and that I tried to be all romantic by cooking a meal for TheManTheMyth but you'd be wrong with that thought process.
TheManTheMyth and I, old-fashioned romantics that we aren't, celebrate Valentine's Day the same way we celebrate August 27: we don't.
27 years ago, I was at work, busily ringing folks up as a cashier at our local Gemco when I happened to notice my dad and my boss standing there. My boss told me to take a break because my dad needed to talk to me. And my dad told me that my fiance "G," who had been in declining health and had been in the hospital for 2 months at that point, had had a massive stroke and was brain dead. So I go home and I sit there and wait for the call from G's parents telling me it was all over.
And I wait. And I wait. And I wait. The next day, it was my Grandparents who came and told me that G had died after a hard fought battle that included dialysis, 2 kidney transplants, multiple strokes in the last year of his life, the removal of his spleen and a last minute diagnoses of diabetes before his body finally called it quits at the age of 24.
Yesterday morning, my brother in law called to let us know that my mother in law had been rushed to the hospital with pneumonia and a urinary infection. He said it wasn't looking good and to be prepared. My MIL was diagnosed with Alzheimer's about 10 years ago and has become little more than an adult size newborn in the last few months.
Last night BIL calls and tells me that it will only be a matter of hours now. Too much fluid in her lungs and brain, her heart rate has plummeted, her blood pressure is almost at a standstill and she struggles to breathe with lungs filled with fluid. And because she had made out her living will before she became incapacitated, BIL tells me no lifesaving measures will be made. The only thing the hospital will do is administer pain meds and make her as comfortable as possible.
And just like when my father in law died, TheManTheMyth is out in the desert in an area where there is no cellphone service. That time, we came home to dozens of hysterical voice mails from family members.
Once again, I sit and wait for THAT phone call.
And the waiting is the hardest part.
