Puppies and kitties and butterflies... or was it unicorns?

People of the Internet, I am going to tell you a tale of woe, intrigue and fantastical things the likes of which have never been seen or imagined. Then, I am going to tell you it's true. All of it. Some of you will scoff, some will believe, but all of you will leave here changed from who you were when you arrived.

It all started with that call from the hospital, y'know... the one where they call on Friday saying that they've had a cancellation on Monday the 19th, so get your a*s in here for knee surgery, Mr. Eclectic, no-we-don't-care-how-many-other-plans-you-may-have. I should have known at that point that something big was on the horizon.

Monday dawned, and Mr. Eclectic dutifully ate and drank nothing, anticipating a surgery time at 1:30p.m. I took him to the hospital and left for an afternoon of shuttling offspring hither and yon, thinking they would call around 4. The hospital didn't, but Mr. Eclectic did. To say he hadn't even gone into surgery yet. I'll spare you the details, but we didn't leave the hospital until well after 10:00p.m., and neither of us slept very well that night.

Tuesday followed, with Mr. Eclectic in pain and on drugs, and of course that's the day Littlest Eclectic had a violin recital, Miss Eclectic had a track meet and an induction into the National Honor Society ceremony. Mr. Eclectic couldn't attend any of it. Frowny face.

Wednesday 3:00a.m.: an Eclectic offspring got up to use the bathroom. Flushed. Hmmm... something's wrong, better flush again. And again. And yet again. By then, water had covered the bathroom floor, seeped up the walls, down through the crevices, onto the hallway carpet and over to the guestroom, and DOWN, DOWN, DOWN (powered by gravity!) through the canister light housing to the entry-way below. At 3:00 in the morning. And Mr. Eclectic was drugged and immobile.

While I entertained myself at that early hour sopping up the mess, the wind outside was blowing. Blowing, and blowing, and blowing. It blows, let me tell you. It blew over the basketball hoop in the driveway. The same basketball hoop underneath which the (newly-acquired) Corolla was parked. Let me set it up mathematically for you: basketball hoop + wind + gravity + parked car = many interesting indented geometrical shapes that weren't on the car before.

Wednesday filled itself with various calls to contractors and insurance companies... oh, PLUS a trip to the dentist because Mr. Eclectic had lost a filling! Meanwhile, the phone calls resulted in visits by guys in trucks with name tags and industrial-sized fans which the guys left with us for the next 5 days. Which was cool of them, really, except that the fans are really noisy.

While they visited, they pulled up the bathroom floor entirely, cut into sheetrock, cut out wet carpet, and pulled out the toilet upstairs, leaving it in the bathtub making both unusable for the foreseeable future. And did I mention that Jason was scheduled to arrive as our house guest on Thursday, in preparation for traveling to Vancouver, B.C. for TequilaCon? Well, he was. And he did. Welcome, Sir. Please excuse our mess. (How embarrassing! But Jason was gracious and understanding, although I expect he will suffer PTSD from the experience at some point.)

So, Friday, to burn off some stress and enjoy the gorgeous day, I went for a bike ride. And got a flat tire. And grabbed my tools to change it, which was when I discovered I didn't have a CO2 cartridge with me. So, I walked a few miles pushing my bike to the bike shop. While they changed the tire, I browsed upstairs in the retail department. A few minutes later, they hollered up, "It's ready! I then scampered down the wooden stairs in my cleated bike shoes, and slipped. THAT's when I fell on my cell phone (in the back pocket of my cycling jersey) and smashed it to smithereens.

Good thing I left on Saturday for Vancouver, before anything else could happen. As for what happened there, well... here are some photos:










Really, in retrospect, it's a good thing the first part of last week happened to ground me in reality, because the weekend sure did feel like a dream. And the soundtrack is Dave, playing a guitar on the market square in Victoria, singing about puppies and kitties and unicorns. Amazing. Truly.

Phantoms

Cradling a mug of steaming coffee, she inhaled deeply and savored the heady fragrance, warm and deep and reminiscent of hazy mornings on a beach somewhere. Ah, but some musings are best left alone. She squared her shoulders and marshaled her thoughts into other territory, though the notion lingered just off the starboard bow of her consciousness.

Memories are powerful boats, ferrying all sorts of perceptions, emotions and fantasies into consciousness -- bidden or not, and sometimes all that's needed to set them afloat is a scent, a glimpse, a familiar image, a slant of the light, or shadow. No amount of determination to forget is equal to the strength of a memory evoked, even if it's but a phantom memory of something merely desired, never experienced. Such memories are perhaps the most troublesome, since they blur the lines between what is known, what can be known, and what is nevertheless true.

Genuine thoughts seemed closely associated with either coffee or wine, she noted wryly. The indisputable nature of the fact confirmed the adage, "Better living through chemistry," she supposed, and poured herself another cup.