...another story

I wound up five minutes late getting in to work today because of an extreme post-office emergency. I had several packages to mail out not to mention a mother's day card to my moms-in-law which I failed to mail yesterday. Why? Cause I somehow don't have her address in my address book and my wife's off at the crazy hospital on a psychiatric rotation with her book. By the time I thought to look for alternate means of digging it up today, everyone I know who would know the address had gone to work so I couldn't call anyone. I searched my computer, went through old e-mails, went through old love letters I'd sent to Ashley, but the address was nowhere to be found. Finally, at 25 minutes til 3 (when I had to be at work) I broke down and called my mother-in-law herself.

"Hey, Ma. How'd you like to help me avoid a brutal beating in about four days?"

Ma laughed. "Forgot to mail something yesterday, didn't you?" she said. She's known I'm a goober for a long time now. In fact, she probably could have called me in advance on this one and saved me time. It's okay, though, cause she herself married a goober who never remembers to send a mother's day card until the last minute or later. Ma gave me her address, I grabbed up all my packages and bills and dashed for the car.

At the post office, there were three people in line ahead of me. The first of them was a lady who was sending at least one package of her own with an unnecessary amount of hassle to go along with it. A.) It was almost completely unwrapped, so she had to get the postal employee to help her with that; B) she had to get every form of "extra" the post office offers, from delivery confirmation to insurance to a troop of frickin dancing midgets to deliver it, and had to fill out ninety-seven separate forms to do it. And there I stood, without a stamp to my name and no cash to buy one from the machine. I could have bailed on my eBay packages, but if I was gonna mail Ma's card I was going to have to stand there and wait and mail EVERYTHING just so I could pay with my debit card and get a stamp too. It was already 10 minutes til 3 and I'd been in the post office for at least four minutes already. At 6 minutes til 3, the lady in front finally got all her shit together and sent off. At four minutes til 3, I did too.

So I was late, which made me pissy. I parked my car in the lowest parking spot on the hill, which was pretty much the only available one, what with all the junior college kids stealing our spaces every Thursday.

From then on I tried to get into a better mood but it wasn't easy with the truckload of needy patrons dumped on us. Okay, so there were only two needy patrons, but I couldn't help either of them with their Herculean concerns.
Fortunately, our librarians had thrown a mother's day brunch for the moms in their Thursday Story Hour time and had plenty of leftovers. These kids are little mutie freaks, or something, though. They eat weird stuff like broccoli and cauliflower and fruit. And LIKE it. They also eat cheese, which along with the b&c made for a great mid-afternoon, low-carb friendly snack for me. I was just polishing off my last bite of cauliflower with ranch dippy sauce when Magenta, one of the home-school kids who hangs out in the library came inside and told me she thought my car had been hit.

MOTHER PUSSBUCKET!!!!

I dashed outside and sure enough that's what it looked like. A behemoth of a Dodge Ram truck had somehow wedged itself into the space in front of my car, seemingly backing over my hood in the process. At first I thought maybe its brakes had just gone out and my car was the only thing that had prevented it from rolling back down the hill and killing lots of people. This was a slight comfort. A much greater comfort was the fact that the truck hadn't actually touched my car at all. When viewed from the proper angle, the back trailer hitch of truck was a mere 3 inches away from denting my hood.

After that, my mood was much lighter.