When calling 911...

I'm driving home from work the other day, and am on the freeway. It's a really annoying freeway onramp, very curvy, little merge room, and you're merging into a speed limit of 70 mph. The car in front of me is going 40. In rush-hour traffic. No joke. I get around him as fast as possible, so as not end up on the evening news as the cause of a 15-car-pileup.

I watch him in my rearview mirror. He's swerving all over the place, straddling the white line, then inside the lane, then pushing into the other lane...

'He's going to hurt someone.'

I dug through my purse and pulled out my cell phone. I dialed 9-1-1.

"9-1-1, what is your emergency?"
"Well, uh, it's not really an emergency..." I realized this wasn't a good time to be self-effacing. "There's a guy driving on the freeway. I think he's having a medical emergency or something."
"Why do you think he's having a medical emergency?"
"He's driving all over the place, weaving, with very varying speeds."
'Very varying?' I thought to myself.
"Why do you think this might be a medical emergency?"
"Well, uh, there's a handicapped card hanging from his rearview mirror."
"Okay. I will patch you through to state patrol."

I explained my story again to state patrol. The officer sounded cute, and I managed to refrain from asking if he was single. "I'm heading eastbound on I-90," I told him. "I just passed the Sullivan exit."

At the end of the call, the irony of the situation hit - I was talking on a cell phone, not on a hands-free device. What if I had been pulled over? "Could you hold on a minute, Officer? I need to hang up with the other officer before I can accept your ticket."

I got home and told my parents about my "ordeal." I got to the part about telling the officer my location on the freeway, when my dad interrupted me.

"Wait, you said you were going westbound."

"No, eastbound."

"You were leaving work, heading home."

"Correct."

"Then you were traveling westbound."

I recoiled in horror. Good samaritan that I am, I had just given the police the wrong information. They probably had caller ID, too. The rest of the evening, I sat on my cell phone in a mild panic. What if they called me back? What if they said, "Ms. D, you are an idiot. Next time you ever have to call 9-1-1, we will go in the opposite direction of where you tell us to go, and will probably find you quicker that way"?

Fine. Last time I try to do the right thing. Next time a cashier gives me too much change, I am keeping it.

And then there were 6!

I am so super excited! I have six followers! And only one of them HAS to like me (my dad, Doug) : ))) How cool.

Cool, I am not. There is a (very married) physical therapist where I work. I swear he only talks to me because it's funny to see my face turn thirteen shades of red.

I did my thesis oral presentation yesterday. As I'm sitting through everyone else's theses, trying to stay awake, I notice my suit jacket does not match my pants. My suit jacket was dark brown with pink stripes. My pants were tan. Everyone had their thesis on the conference table in front of them, neatly bound by an alligator clip. Mine was in a messy pile of papers with rolled edges and scribbles everywhere. My hair is that particular length where it flips out - but only on the right side. It's like my head is perpetually caught in an eastward-blowing windstorm. Provided I am facing north. If I was facing south, then the windstorm would be...crap. I'm not going to try to figure that out. I'm almost done with school! No more thinking! Yay! : )))

Maybe that is why we hate high school so much - that is where we first really come to terms with our uncoolness, and the petrifying thought that perhaps the uncoolness is not fleeting, regardless of what our mothers tell us.

In an effort to be more cool, I cleaned the used Kleenexes off of my desk at work. I wonder if hot physical therapist guy noticed.

My Powers of Observation Leave Much to be Desired

I'm sitting at work today. It's about 2 p.m. I feel something in my sweater. I reach up to my armpit.

Yep, there's definitely a foreign object in my armpit.

I discreetly remove it. Well, as discreetly as one can be, sitting in a cubicle with four other people and your arm is reaching under your shirt to retrieve something...

It was a wadded-up dryer sheet.

At first I was relieved - it wasn't a dead rodent or a coiled up snake. (I have a bizarre fear of snakes, spiders, and rodents finding their way into my clothing or bedding.)

But now I'm just worried. Who makes it almost an entire day at work with a wad of dryer sheet stuck in their armpit, not noticing it until a painful rash starts to form once the chemicals leech into their skin?

Thesis: The Mechanisms of Student Fear

I just hit the "send" button on what I hope will be the accepted draft of my master's thesis.

This thesis has felt doomed from the get-go. It was supposed to be done last semester, December of 2008. In November, I had to put my beloved dachshund, best friend of 14 years, to sleep, which brought all motivation for anything to a grinding halt. If I had trouble convincing myself to shower in the mornings, convincing myself to finish my thesis was not going to happen.

Thank goodness for foresight, right? That's precisely why I signed up to take the thesis course one semester prior to when I would really, truly, honest-to-God need to be finished with it. Our educational system is all about educating one to their own pitfalls - mine being procrastination.

I've been working full-time, keeping up my beautiful house, keeping my sanity, and plugging away at the thesis, "What Makes College Students Pay Attention?" Needless to say, I don't much care anymore what makes college students pay attention.

I gave myself a deadline - I need to have it in the professor's inbox by Monday morning, 4/13. Grades are probably due by 5/1, and I still need my thesis approved by the committee, and I need to do my oral presentation of my thesis to the committee...graduation is in three weeks! What if this draft isn't accepted?

Pushing my panic aside, I settled in this Saturday evening to finish it, once and for all. I picked my laptop cord off of the floor and plugged it in.

It popped and sparked a flourescent blue that had me blessing my house's concrete, and not carpeted, floors. Most concernedly, the blue flash didn't occur at the plug, but rather in the middle of the cord.

I carefully unplugged it. Once disconnected, it popped again. I left it on the floor for several minutes, hoping the charge would somehow drain from the cord before I handled it again.

The cord was nearly severed in several places. "What the..." I looked closer. The severing had suspicious-looking teeth marks...

"ELEANOR ROOSEVELT!!!"

Ellie poked her head from behind the sofa. I sighed, knowing it was my own fault for leaving anything inside my house that I didn't want chewed up.

I called my parents. "Do you have any electrical tape?" Doug asked. "I think so," I answered.

I taped up my cord as best as I could, and got to work. Several hours later, I had yet to catch fire, so that was a good sign.

After hitting the "send" button, I expected to feel a huge relief, perhaps even a sense of accomplishment. I just finished the requirements for a master's degree!

But what if it doesn't get accepted? My grandpa is coming up from California for this graduation, and I can sustain a lot of embarrassment - I can go through a whole day of school with a cat's hair ball stuck to my rear, I can hideously misspeak and announce to my coworkers that I'm exiting for the bathroom "because this is going to take awhile," (when I meant the patient file I was working on would take awhile, not the trip to the restroom)....but I don't think I can withstand the embarrassment Grandpa coming to see me graduate and I fail.

Optical Illusions

Funny story. So for the past year or so, every time I look in my car's rearview mirror, it looks like there's something hanging out of my nose. And of course, I look after I'm done with a first-and-last date, or work, or grocery shopping when the exceptionally good looking clerk decides to chat me up.

I load my groceries, and slide behind the wheel. I turn the ignition, and look into the rearview mirror. And I see it.

"Dang! What is with my nose!" I bark at my steering wheel.

The other day, I get in my car after work. I look into the mirror to back out. It's back. I reach up to my nostril. Nope, nothing. I look in the mirror again. Wait a sec...

I reach up to the rearview mirror. There is a scratch dead-even with where my nostril appears when I'm sitting in the driver's seat.

Oh well. I may have blamed a lot of last dates on a hanger that wasn't really there, but at least the mystery is now solved.

Tummy troubles

I am so freaking frustrated! I've been sick for 7 weeks now, with flu-like symptoms. I've had a ton of blood work done, a lot of samples of this and that taken, and the best a doctor could come up with is, "It must be the flu." Right. I've had a bone marrow transplant. Are you really comfortable enough passing this, whatever it is, off as the flu?

My oncologist is now testing my blood for Celiac (even though the colonoscopy doc said it wasn't Celiac). She also told me in the interim to cut out the gluten, see what happened.

I felt better than I've felt in months.

This has GOT to be in my head. I've never had stomach problems. Did I really develop Celiac out of the blue?

Last night, I convinced myself that I'm imagining this. My grandma is a champion hypochondriac, and while I've never imagined health problems before, maybe this one I'm wrong on?

I ate pizza. I went to bed.

Upon waking this morning, my first conscious thought was, "Holy crap, I feel like crap."

I am a poor person! Well, not really, but I can't afford go to gluten-free if there's not really a reason to go gluten-free. Sure, I felt a lot better on the GF diet, but I'm sure some people would feel better on an all-chocolate-chip-cookie diet, too. Doesn't mean they should do it. Although chocolate chip cookies are, admittedly, a lot cheaper than rice bread.

I find out Wednesday what the beep is going on. I don't know what I want. I guess I want it to be Celiac so I know I'm not insane and so that I have a reason to go GF. But then, I also wanted my post-chemotherapy hair to grow back red and curly. And I wanted to marry Matt Damon. And I wanted a black Audi TT convertible. And I wanted to be happy. Oh well, one out of four isn't bad.

The mysterious white paint

My dog gets into mischief. The source of his mischief is usually readily identifiable. Except for the white paint.



Every few months, Trumie will prance up to me and want a butt scratch. (I have to bend quite low to do this for such a tiny dog.) I reach down, and...there's white paint smeared on one of his haunches.



There's nothing freshly painted in my house, no white paint tubes conveniently left on the ground for him to chew on...any ideas?

Trumie and I start dog school in a few days. I have to take off from work a half hour prior to when I'd normally have to take off, because I'll need enough time to catch him to put him in his little carry bag. For the love of Pete. The things we do for big, brown eyes.