My friends threaten only half-jokingly to back me into a corner and have a stress intervention on behalf of the part of me that is not tied to the library. It is now a very small part. I live with a library person, all my close friends are library people, I spend 11 hours a day getting to, working at, and getting home from the library, I book my readings at the library, I work on job applications that will bring me up to other levels at the library when I get home, and I go out for drinks to 'unwind' and end up talking about the library.

I dream of updated training materials and holds lists in which every item is found. My nightmares include co-workers scheduling me for 4am baking shifts at their fantasy restaurants with out telling me about it. I dream that my supervisor is observing me through psychic channels and is "watching" me while I shave my armpits in the shower.

I can't have a conversation that doesn't revolve, in some way, around some aspect of intellectual freedom or the obtuseness of the our main data base. I am considering organizing my cds by the dewey decimal system. 'Party Girl' watches like a coked up version of my actual life (minus the male strippers and all that falafel).

I own one of those librarian action figure dolls. I buy clothes based on how they will jibe with any future library situation I might be in. I buy only closed-toed shoes.

During yoga practice, I concentrate on thinking about anything other than books and how they get from one place to another. People send me pictures of libraries when they go on vacation. I started a blog to give short reviews of all the books I read, but couldn't keep up.

Do you have your library card with you?

I'm at the doctor's office with my mother, waiting for him to interpret my chest x-ray and tell me I have acute hypochondria, when it occurs to me that as long as I have my doctor's full attention, now would be the time to tell him about my gross deformity.

Wait, I would just like to share, for the record, that the reason my mother is accompanying me to the clinic is that I have just picked her up at the airport for her annual week-long visit, and the only same-day appointment I could get was adjacent to her arrival. I could have offered to drop her off at my house for a nap or an uninterrupted session of digging in my drawers, but she would have insisted on coming with me. Whenever there's an opportunity to go to a place where healing happens, you can bet she'll be calling shotgun.

Back to my deformity.

I'm in my jeans and one of those washed-a-million-times-and-looking-like-it gowns, sort of draped over my front like a paint smock on a preschooler. I couldn't figure out how to tie it in the back, so I'm just resting firmly against the upright exam table in a manner that I hope appears to be casual.

My doctor enters the room after giving me the courtesy knock, and proceeds to prescribe ibuprofen and rest for the stabbing pain in my chest. We have been here before, and I have the suspicion that he thinks I'm a little Nuts, but he keeps his personal opinion of my flourishing symptoms behind a mask of professional kindness that makes me want to cry onto his starchy white coat.

I know I'm one of those overbooked appointments, but I dive in anyway.

"Say, there's one more thing I wanted to ask you about."

He looks apprehensive, glances at the door, then composes himself and resettles in his rolling chair.

"I have this skin tag, well, a hideous deformity, really, and it's in A...delicate location. I'm always catching it with my razor and I was wondering if I should make an appointment to get it removed, or if that would be something you could just take care of right now?"

"I could take a look at it if you'd like. Where did you say it was?" He rolls toward me.

"Well, let me have just a second here..." I stand up and scramble to get my pants down to my knees to give him visual access to the sight. "Um, pardon me...it's right here on my inner thigh." I point to the location, right where my leg meets my body, and he immediately says: "Let me go get the liquid nitrogen and I can freeze it right now."

"Great."

He leaves the room and my pants are around my ankles and the gown is flapping open and my mother is in the waiting room reading the new issue of 'Health' and this is not cool.

I kick my jeans and underwear across the room, unsure of when my doctor will return, and try to tie my gown one more time, then realize that a far more awkward thing is I'm still wearing my shoes. My sense of aesthetics is wrestling with my practicality. (In case you don't know already, I have no sense of modesty.) I take the shoes off.

When the doctor reenters with what looks like a whipped cream canister, I look like the perfect patient. My bare legs knock against the table, and he asks me if I want to lean back. I accept.

I flip the gown up and basically flash him my nether parts. He looks unfazed, but gently brings the fabric back down and arranges it carefully.

"I'm just going to try to make this as respectful as possible, here."

"Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to, uh..."

"That's alright, just lie back. I'm going to freeze it a few times and wait for it to thaw inbetween to make sure that the most tissue damage occurs. It'll fall off more quickly that way, and more completely as well."

"Okay."

I sink down, hear the compressed material hissing out of it's container, and feel something tiny with needly teeth biting at my nodule.

"Just let me know if it's too much for you."

"It's fine so far."

He stops, leans back and looks at it in a detached way, kind of how I look at a pile of bills or bird crap on my car. Well, that's interesting, how did that end up there?

He leans in again and the teeth dig in a little deeper. Stops. Waits for the thaw. Starts. Stops.

His gaze is intent, slightly frowning. I wonder what it is that has captured his attention, and I imagine that the slight layer of frost melting might be visually captivating so I ask: "Is is steaming?"

Finally, after years of him taking me seriously, although I like to be taken seriously where my bodily functions are concerned, he cracks. Laughter comes out of his bearded face for an instant, and he catches my eye, and I realize what I have said. I laugh too, and we have, together, in this ridiculous, intimate moment, made real contact.

He zaps it a few more times, gives me instructions to keep an eye on it, as well as take my ibuprofen, (like giving me homework, he knows I thrive with specific instructions, can't stand to be told to just wait things out), and bids me farewell as he leaves the exam room, his exterior rebuilt, professional demeanor restored.

But I know. I have seen him laugh.

My mother is sacked out on a loveseat in the waiting room when I join her.

She asks "What happened in there?" and I tell her that my doctor and I had a lot to talk about.

"I'm not going to spend any money. I'm just going to get a quick snack with Chris after work, maybe go for a walk, and then going home."

Yeah, right.

I spend most of a gift certificate at Reading Frenzy where I listen to an author (who is there to sign autographs but has no takers) talk to the counter person about how he screams "I am loyal only to Allah!" whenever he gets on a plane.

Yeah, right.

I have to walk right by Buffalo exchange to get to my car and I still have 15 minutes until Chris is done with work so I swing in, sure I won't be able to fall in love with anything in that short amount of time.

Yeah, right.

I walk out with a black cardigan with skull buttons and a green jacket that Chris would say looks "smart." I can't believe it though, since it is about 92 degrees outside and I am already in what some cultures would consider to be my underwear and here I am picking out long-sleeved clothes that I totally cannot bear the thought of actually wrapping my limbs in.

I pick Chris up at the library and the first thing that comes out of both of us in lieu of greeting is: "Sushi?"

And so I spend $50 all while telling myself that it's all necessary. Especially the sushi.

Kristi and I are in trouble. Not the kind where possessed pumas are chasing us on our bikes through a remote wooded area with no chance of us out-running them, or a serial killer pursuing us through a maze-like hallway in a 4 star hotel where all of the employees seem to be taking a mass break or anything, but still.

We can't find a screwdriver small enough to unscrew the last two screws on this picture frame to reorient the wire hanger. This is important because we want to put up this new print that her boyfriend bought before he gets back from getting coffee. He likes this print, but hasn't had time to frame it. We conspire to make his day. This is consuming all our energy, wrought from Subway's delicious Vegie Delights. (I prefer double mayo, Kristi likes double cheese.)

"I've only got this one screwdriver," she said, brandishing the oversized thing at me like a weapon in a street fighting movie.

I'm eye level with the frame, trying to figure out how someone twisted the screws in so tight that they almost touch the mat.

"Don't you have one of those little ones for fixing glasses?" I ask, picking up the picture and shaking it slightly, contemplating hitting it on the edges with a hammer, like you do when you need to get a new jar of pickles open.

"No."

"Oh."

I try a dime, a butter knife, a piece of plastic of unspecified origin, a few more attempts with the too-large screwdriver, and I'm ready to give up.

I blow away the metal shavings that are piling up from my stripping out the screw.

I hear Kristi pulling apart yet another drawer in the hopes of finding something adequate for our hardware needs.

Upon close examination, it appears that the screw no longer has any sort of ledge at all, well, perhaps just a small lip of ragged metal. I think about what it would feel like to have it shoved in my eye.

I get an idea. I pick up the original tool and try to fit the end of it in the sad opening. It fits, sort of. I press down and twist, oh so gently, and feel the victorious sensation of the metal giving way, physics on my side, the torque coaxing the stupid 1/4 inch piece of crap screw from it's cold steel embrace with the frame.

"Hey. I got it."

"What? How?"

"I damaged it to the point where the original screwdriver fit. Are we geniuses or what?"

Or what.

I tripped over the edge of the curb and went flying forward, legs pedalling, arms clutched tight to my bag. Don't want to let go of that bag. Happily , I caught the first wave of my fall with my elbow and my right palm, abrading the surface in several inch segments, but missing my skull almost completely. My hip took the second bounce, and before I stopped skidding across the sidewalk on the busy downtown corner, my body happened to roll face up, and I saw Chris looking frozen and horrified, hands out, mouth open.

For the record, he couldn't have stopped me if he tried. I would have taken him down with me. Unstoppable force.

Having ascertained that I hadn't knocked myself out completely, I asked Chris the most logical question that popped into my mind:

"Did anyone see my underwear?"

"All I saw was legs."

"Oh."

Next question: "Is there a hole in my sweater where I utilized it as landing gear?"

Answer: No, however, further inspection at the coffee shop led me to discover that I was, in fact, bleeding all over inside the sleeve of my new cashmere sweater.

After having Laura put aside her schedule changes to help me bind up my arm like King Tut, I felt the actual pain start to seep into my left side.

It's amazing how often I casually rest my elbow on the edge of tables, desks, and other flat surfaces. Wow.

The next morning in the shower, while trying to clean the rest of the cement particles out of the scab, I noticed that there were sweater fibers ground into the wound. Under the crusty layer of dried blood.

What do I do with that?

I dumped hydrogen peroxide on it, slapped a bunch of band-aids over the worst of it, and decided to not worry about it for now.

I'm sure the material will come off when I'm healed up. I think. Yuck.

Nothing funny has occurred in the past two weeks. Not that I can write about, anyway.

However, I have been to 2 birthday parties, ditched out on the 3rd, attended a swank housewarming party, found a bag in our hedge that was likely stolen in 2003(evidenced by the expired driver's license and the slug-dissolved cigarettes found within), consumed a drink with 'pureed kiwi' as the main ingredient (second to the vodka, of course), and bounced around during daylight hours at a lesbian dance party while my sister took my drink orders and did the server's tango through lots of touchy-feely grrrl reunions.

I basically drank alcohol for 10 nights in a row.

Now, after no days of reflection on my somewhat drunken behavior, I am about to take the bus home to greet my boyfriend's dad and step mom, who are here for a week of no air conditioning or cable, a cat that ejects all her hair the second you touch her, and us as their exciting Portland instigators.

I'll have to let you know how this goes.

Neighbor girl invites me to her 'End of School' slumber party.

When I stop by to say hi, she and 5 other girls are in their pajamas, foam curlers in various states of coming unraveled, rolling around on the floor while playing a board game version of 'Truth or Dare.'

I wave to her grandma, who is draped on the couch at the edge of the room in a way that can only be described as 'melty.' Her arm is thrown over her face, the crook of her elbow sort of pulling her nose upward into a porcine-like grimace. The girls are shrieking every 3 seconds or so, taking great pains to humiliate each other in that special way that girls do. Every shout for 'truth' sends out invisible little girl feelers, bristling with palpable tension, waiting for someone to spill their actual beans, giving the group the upper hand. Soon all of these girls will learn what we all had to learn the hard way: to lie.

I remember riding the bus on the way to some class field trip in second grade, when a pretty, popular girl sat down next to me and grilled me for information on the boy of my pre-adolescent dreams. Keep in mind that I'm only like 8 at the time, and the thought of boys frankly turned my stomach, but so anyway I look around on the bus and pick the blond haired blue-eyed son of a semi-famous baseball player because I thought it would be safe, after all, everyone loved him, so it wouldn't brand me as a freak to pick the person that anyone would pick. All this only after I swear this girl to secrecy. She swears. Crosses her heart and hopes to die.

"Darren," I say, thinking I might have passed this social pop quiz.

But no.

She stands up on the seat, grabs the one in front of her and screams, "Angie loves Darren! Angie loves Darren!"

To my astonishment and horror, the whole bus starts in with her. I shrink down as close to the floor as I possibly can, and listen with a totally new level of understanding of the word 'coward' as a girl with Downs Syndrome named Angie starts yelling, "I do not! I do not!" and basically taking the heat off me for the entirety of the incident.

Christ.

But back at the slumber party: her grandma crapped out on the couch, her mom making about 50 hot dogs in the kitchen, as well as opening multiple bags of sugary snack food and gushing about John Travolta in 'Grease,' which they will be watching soon, if they can sit still long enough, and her brothers shipped out for the evening, I decide to beat a hasty retreat, but not before I congratulate myself on having lived through the stuff she's going through right now, and promising to look out for her as much as I can while we're neighbors.

As I read in a book not so long ago, "There is no worse training for adulthood than having been a child."

The neighbor kids come over, insisting that we watch a movie with them. We dig around, knowing that they have all but exhausted the stack of old James Bond movies from my personal collection, or at least they have fast-forwarded to the good parts: the empty space suits that explode for no reason in deep space laser fights, underwater car chases and harpoon battles, boat stunts, alligators fed by a man with a fake hook over his real arm, you know, the awesome basics of action movies since the beginning of time.

But lo! What have we here? The Indiana Jones Trilogy! A great gift, and certainly something to keep a couple of action deprived kids content for an hour and a half.

Ten minutes into "Raiders of the Lost Ark," one of them looks at me and asks, "Just how old is this movie?"

"Why? Does it seem dated?"

I look at the box and nearly choke on my popcorn. 1981. Holy crap. This movie, such a basic tenant of my childhood, is now 25 years old.

Amid clamorings that we are trying to bore them out of our house, Chris lets the room hear his thought; that all must sit still and be quiet or leave the area.

Things are quiet again for a while, and the dreaded storyline develops.

"Are there going to be any more snakes?"

"This isn't like the video game at all."

When, finally, the infamous face-melting scene is imminent, Chris gets everyone to settle down and watch by telling us that it scared the crap out of him when he was their age. I second that, and wait to be disgusted.

It lasts all of 9 seconds, and when it is over, one of the kids says: "That was so fakey."

I have officially become an unhip old person, clinging to the scraps of my quickly rotting youth, unable to impress even the children from next door who like my cookies, the fact that I have purple hair nonwithstanding.

Too much humanity, not enough punching. I need to get on board, is the consensus.

After the kids left for more exciting activities, Chris and I talked about other movies that scared us silly when we were 10. Embarrassingly, Superman 3 would make my list, although I can't remember why, only that when the bad guy gets it in the end, he gets it in such a dramatic way that it gave me nightmares. Also, that movie with Tom Sellack called "Runaway" where robotic spiders would follow you around and inject you with a paralyzing agent and guns shot bullets that could follow you around corners and would explode on impact. I must have entered every dark room like a veteran undercover cop for 3 months after that, not absorbing the absurdity of the notion that futuristic killer spider robots would want to kill a 10 year old girl in a trailer in rural Minnesota.

It was an irrational fear.

We are waiting for bacon to be delivered to our table. I am sipping a too-spicy Virgin Mary that I hope will clear out my pollen-irritated sinus cavity.

Chris is talking about something important, his music perhaps, it escapes me now, but I couldn't concentrate on anything he was saying because he had something stuck to his lower eyelash. I stared at it, thinking it must fall off the next time he blinks. But it didn't. It hung there, suspended above the rim of his glasses, bobbing with the weight of itself as he spoke.

Finally I say something.

"Hey, um, you've got a thing-" I make a swiping gesture at my own face to mirror the problem.

"What? Oh." He takes off his glasses, sets them on the table, where I can't help but think bacon will nest briefly in a few minutes, before being devoured by the two of us.

He rubs at his eye, and puts his glasses back on.

"Better?" he asks, then goes right back into whatever he was saying.

I still can't focus on it though, because now the offending particle has moved up to his top eyelash, where it looks to me like it will drop fiendishly into his eye at any moment, blinding him for life.

"So I just really think that my printing is going to take priority over music for a while, at least until-"

"I'm sorry, I have to tell you: the thing is still really close to your eye."

"Agh! Will you stop? Why can't we just have a conversation without you picking stuff off of me?"

I admit; I am highly distracted by foreign things attached to the faces of those I'm conversing with. I can't think of anything else until the thing/s are removed. It's a major flaw, as there's always something stuck to someone.

A friend just informed me the other night that the night her boyfriend came back to town after being away for a year, that the first thing she did was reach over, as he was speaking, and pick something out of his teeth. He didn't even miss a beat, just kept talking. How do we get to that point?

We are waiting for bacon to be delivered to our table. I am sipping a too-spicy Virgin Mary that I hope will clear out my pollen-irritated sinus cavity.

Chris is talking about something important, his music perhaps, it escapes me now, but I couldn't concentrate on anything he was saying because he had something stuck to his lower eyelash. I stared at it, thinking it must fall off the next time he blinks. But it didn't. It hung there, suspended above the rim of his glasses, bobbing with the weight of itself as he spoke.

Finally I say something.

"Hey, um, you've got a thing-" I make a swiping gesture at my own face to mirror the problem.

"What? Oh." He takes off his glasses, sets them on the table, where I can't help but think bacon will nest briefly in a few minutes, before being devoured by the two of us.

He rubs at his eye, and puts his glasses back on.

"Better?" he asks, then goes right back into whatever he was saying.

I still can't focus on it though, because now the offending particle has moved up to his top eyelash, where it looks to me like it will drop fiendishly into his eye at any moment, blinding him for life.

"So I just really think that my printing is going to take priority over music for a while, at least until-"

"I'm sorry, I have to tell you: the thing is still really close to your eye."

"Agh! Will you stop? Why can't we just have a conversation without you picking stuff off of me?"

I admit; I am highly distracted by foreign things attached to the faces of those I'm conversing with. I can't think of anything else until the thing/s are removed. It's a major flaw, as there's always something stuck to someone.

A friend just informed me the other night that the night her boyfriend came back to town after being away for a year, that the first thing she did was reach over, as he was speaking, and pick something out of his teeth. He didn't even miss a beat, just kept talking. How do we get to that point?

I was walking across the street with Eddy, severely underdressed, on our way to meet Luci et al for dancing hilarity. My heels were cute, sturdy, but flat, with no traction. These were not all terrain fashion statements.

So when a guy heading the other way, wearing eyeliner, looking cute as hell, says, "Hey, I love your coat!" and I turn and say "Thanks!" and try to look all runway model about it, the first thing to go is my footing.

I land sprawled on the asphalt, Eddy already ahead of me and standing on the curb, looking amused, with just the right amount of concern. I am mortified beyond any and all sense. This, for some reason, perhaps because I am no longer a teenager, goes well beyond the period stain on the back of the dress, the lipstick on not only the teeth, but the face.

Cute boy rushes back to me and says "Oh my God! Are you okay? You must need a hug."

I, still sitting on the ground trying to assess the glass absorption into my palms apologize for making him have to witness my flailing around like a clumsy ass.

He insists on helping me up and embracing me, his date furious on the opposite corner, while Eddy offers me an elbow when I catch up to him.

Now I understand why women hold onto the proffered arm.

A patron walked up to my desk and stood there, staring at the side of my head.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," I said back.

Then I noticed that he had drool running down his face and soaking into the first five inches of his shirt. He thrust a sweaty clutch of snapdragons at my face.

"These are for you."

"Um...Thanks." I accepted with hesitation, taking the bouquet with only two fingers and placing it gingerly on a piece of absorbent paper.

"What- do you think they're poisonous?" He seemed pretty upset that I hadn't clutched them to my bosom and swooned.

"Huh? No, I'm just putting them here for...later."

Mistake.

"Oh! Not poisonous!" he caterwauled, and snatched them back, bringing them to his mouth and taking a huge, crisp bite and chewing, somewhat messily, while smiling at me as though I had just given him permission to crap on the carpet.

"Sir, you might not wish to do that. In fact, you don't want to eat those. They might not be good for you." I had never encountered anything like this before. Usually the crazy people want to hurt you, not themselves. What was the protocol? I had no idea.

Luckily, the LA sitting next to me jumped up and reiterated my concerns, adding that she thought they might be poisonous.

She called the security officers while I Googled the possibility.

The man happily munched away on the snapdragons, pieces of petal falling from his wet face to land on his soppy shirt and behind him on the floor as he wandered in circles.

Security tried to talk to him and advise him to not down any more exotic plants, but he resisted their common sense advice, assuring them that he knew what he was doing by yelling "Not poisonous! Aphrodisiac!" before he stumbled away and out the door.

A later inspection of the snapdragon arrangement in the lobby confirmed that there was only one lonely stalk left, and that he could have been eating snapdragons all morning. But since he left without the chance to let us know if it was true, we can only speculate on the demise of the decoration.

I was in charge of the Chicken Kiev. The pre-formed, frozen kind; breaded and filled with yellow liquid that by all accounts looks buttery, but tastes strangely synthetic. Chris calls them chicken Twinkies. I was too tired to contemplate the amount of energy it would take to make mashed potatoes, so Chris was in charge of those.

I plunked the solid chunks of processed goodness down in the glass baking dish and walked away.

Chris busied himself with the chopping of the last of the potatoes, having to toss one in the trash when he discovered that part of it had liquified in the bag.

I decided at the last minute to put some frozen corn on a burner, because, well, when else would we eat frozen corn? Why do we even have it in the freezer? What purpose does it serve? But it was a good thing I did, because Chris happily finished the potatoes, announced that he may have put too much milk in them, and left the area.

I went over to investigate, and by checking out their texture, was able to discern that they wouldn't be great, but they wouldn't be too wierd. I stuck my finger in, hoping to be able to make a quick judgement about the possible addition of garlic or butter, but before I even put it in my mouth, I knew something was wrong.

They smelled. Bad.

I sort of hunkered down over the bowl and sniffed. The milk was sour. Not just slightly.

"Chris!" I yelled. "You used spoiled milk in the potatoes!"

He came running and looked at them in disbelief.

"Really?" He took a small bite. "Ooh. You're right."

"Chris, didn't you have cereal earlier today?"

"Yeah."

"You didn't notice the milk was bad then?"

"I guess not. I mean, I thought something was strange, but, I just didn't realize."

We flushed the potatoes and had frozen corn with our chicken Twinkies.

After dinner, Chris gathered all his clean clothes from the laundry area and dumped them on our bed for an enormous version of "The Matching Game."

I love this game, where you spread out all your clothes and separated them into piles, match socks, fold pants and t-shirts. It gives the a warm fuzzy feeling.

After we were left with a large number of orphaned socks, Chris went nuts, inspecting every article of clothing he owned and discarding an entire two garbage bags of socks without mates, t-shirts the color of rust or frayed to a translucent texture, pants covered in ink and paint, and shirts with less than 3 buttons.

It felt great.

A patron just informed me that if I ever wanted to talk about or express my interest in UFOs, I'd be put on a blacklist fo fast it wouldn't even be funny. Then she put her finger to her lips and made a shushing noise. She didn't want anyone to hear her warning me about it, or she'd be put on the list herself. She said she couldn't take off her sunglasses or she'd be recognized for sure. She has to wear them all the time, even in the house.

Some random guy tried to grab hold of me as I was shelving CDs today, a basic patron no-no.

I had been clenching my teeth about a kid listening to his headphones almost too loud. No one seemed to be bothered by him, and I couldn't tell if it was just because I happened to be totally in his personal space, as he wanted the pile of CDs in my hands, which you would have to pry from my cold, dead body before I would just give them up like that.

Then The Grabber laughed really loud, a staccato burst of insane sounding revelry and then nothing. I clenched my teeth together hard enough to hear enamel cracking and swung around to say something, but I didn't see anyone.

I started flipping through the classical section, orchestral, and suddenly an alien paw reached out from the other side of the shelf and made a swipe and my wrist.

I bent over a bit and peered through the opening. There was The Grabber, giggling to himself and wiggling his eyebrows at me. I gave him my best no-nonsense glare over the top of my glasses and pointed right at him, prepared to make a scene if he swatted at me again with anything resembling intention to yank my arm through the shelving.

But he reacted like a 2nd grader and hunched over, then scuttled away like a crab.

Then Headphone Guy started singing along, loud and proud.

I grabbed my truck and took off for the relative safety of the reference desk.

Jesus.

We were on the road at 7:15am on our day off together, driving through jungly traffic on the 205 to get to an 8o’clock appointment at our highly recommended accountant’s office.

I was sick. Something lodged in my sinus cavity the week before and was making my life miserable, breathing wise. Chris was cranky because he had to get up early to go do our taxes, which is reason enough to be in a bad mood.

I was swearing and clutching my forehead in the stop and go lurch of rush hour. There were no signs of an accident or anything that indicated that the road would be freeing up any time soon.

We pulled up to the building at 7:58 and I grinned at Chris.

“Isn’t it amazing? We made it here on time after all.” He looked at me the way a cat looks at a spider before batting it across the floor.

“Yeah, that’s great.”

I turned to pick up the enormous stack of papers needed to itemize our deductions. They weren’t on the back seat. I looked at my bag. They weren’t sticking out the top of that either. I looked at the floor, at Chris’ lap, in my own lap. The papers were not in the vicinity.

I freaked out.

“Oh SHIT! We just drove almost an HOUR to get here early on our DAY OFF and I LEFT THE PAPERS on the KITCHEN TABLE!” My initial outburst was followed by some choice bits of self-criticism, as well as some stuff thrown in the direction of my car mate, who decided to tell me that flipping out and yelling wasn’t going to make the papers magically appear.

We both stormed away from the car. Chris took off down the street with no hat or gloves, even though the morning was brisk enough to have caused a quarter inch frost on everything, and me into the CPA office, trying to pull it together so as to not start blubbering in the presence of people who were going to decide how big my return was.

It was easy to reschedule the appointment, and the woman only stared briefly at my purple hair. I was still pissed about pulling such a bonehead move though, that when I got back out to the car and Chris hadn’t materialized, I figured that if he wanted to walk, that was fine with me, and started to pull out of the parking lot.

Then I envisioned him 45 minutes from home in a completely unfamiliar part of town with no warm clothes and possibly no wallet, and decided to turn my hazard lights on and give him five minutes to show up. I saw him coming towards the car with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up around his ears. For some reason, this didn’t elevate my mood, and I glared at him as he opened his door and fell sighing into his seat.

We had planned on going out for pancakes to celebrate the end of the dreaded tax errand, but now that was in the toilet, as the errand was still looming on the calendar, and now we were just two pissed off people up at an uncivilized hour for basically no reason. I figured we’d just go straight home so we could get on with avoiding each other all day.

Half way through the longest car ride ever, I pulled impulsively into a gas station when I saw that they had a price of under $2/gallon. A guy breezed by and said, fill on a card? To which I said $20 cash, and he said, fill with cash, and then took off. I didn’t have any more than twenty and I tried to catch him, but I had no idea where he went, so I stomped into the store to try to reason it out with the woman inside.

‘Hi hon, I’ll be right there.” Her disembodied voice came floating out of a back room.

I gave a Halls cough drop display a full dose of my animosity with a glower.

“Just a fill up, hon?”

“Well, see, the thing is…”

She looked over her glasses at me, not unkindly.

“It’s cold enough out there to have put a frost on the pumpkin, am I right?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Whatever.”

“You look like you’ve got some frost on your personal pumpkin, if you don’t mind me saying. You know what that needs? A vigorous rubbing. That’ll take care of it.” She glanced at her register. “That’ll be $21.”

I had no idea what she meant, but it was the funniest thing I had heard all day, and I launched into one of those coughing laughs where you grip the surface in front of you and spray spit all over. She let the extra dollar slide.

I stumbled, giggling, out to the car, and announced to Chris that I may have frost on my personal pumpkin. He agreed.

Then we went out for pancakes.

List to catch you up:

-We have termites. And carpenter ants. And no money.
-Portly can no longer shimmy under Chris' dresser as she is too chunky.
-My 30th birthday yeilded me a pink cake with Funfetti frosting, a Get Fuzzy Calendar, a killer unicorn, and lots of drinks.
-The ceiling in the garage is leaking above the dryer.
-I'm obsessed with Ranma 1/2. Mostly the show, but the books are good too. Teenage boys turning into girls and grown men turning into giant pandas seem to be 'my thing.'
-When I requested a clear acrylic ball for my labret piercing at the jewelry counter, the woman asked if it was for work. I said no, it was for my mom, and she gave me a look that could only be described as 'whithering.'
-My work area looks like a demilitarized zone.
-I washed the curtains in the living room after I opened them and was covered with a cascade of cat hair.
-The neighbor kid's biggest wish right now is that dinosaurs were still alive, didn't eat people(or stomp on them), and could be ridden to school.
-I'm paying someone to do my taxes this year. Fuck it.