Day in the Life of an Idiot

 The first thing I did Monday morning was invite my computer to drink an ENTIRE CUP of coffee. Not sure why I did that, but I literally just held the cup over the keyboard and FUMBLED it. I think we all know perfectly well that computers do no like coffee, nor really any copious amounts of liquids inside their electronic brains. 

I am crossing fingers right now? But after letting it dry out for a whole day, I do *think* I may have a working laptop again.

Coffee no longer gets to be even on the same surface as my laptop, however. 

 Tuesday is a coffee day, so I am coming to you fully espresso'd. Wooo.

One of the reasons we chose Tuesday is because when Mason was much younger and we were all doing that thing where we pile into the car every morning at some ungodly hour, drop Shawn off at work, and then take Mason to school, we decided that Tuesdays are actually stealth Mondays, and sometimes worse because you're kind of expecting Mondays to suck?  To mitigate the surprise suckage of Tuesdays, we started stopping for bagels on Tuesday morning. Of course, ironically, this often made Tuesday even more frantic, because we'd have to get up even earlier to accommodate this stop (important point of information, Mason's school had a start time of 7:20 AM.)  Despite this hassle, we doggedly continued the tradition and do so even now that school is over.  I suspect Shawn and I will keep this up long after Mason is gone off to college.

Today has been posited as a road trip day. Mason is not yet awake, but when he gets up, we'll decide if he's still up for it. In the meantime, I have made a list of state parks (and other attractions) within two hours of home (St. Paul, MN.) We could go further, since Shawn is home and so the only restrictions on our time is park closing time, but I have no idea if what Mason wants is the time on the road or the destination.  We'll see. If we go, I'll either post a second journal tonight with pictures or tomorrow.

Tomorrow is going to be busy because I have a critique client that I had to reschedule at 1:45 pm and a funeral at 3 pm over at the band shelter at Lake Harriet. I really wish I still lived on Girard. I could have walked!  But, as it is, I'll have to zip across town and then try to find parking. 

There have been a lot of funerals lately. Oddly, neither this one, nor the previous one (Saturday) were COVID related. Cancer took both of my friends--one of whom was only a year older than me. (FUCK CANCER.)  ( Read more... CW: death and funerals )

My friend had a giveaway table and I was instantly drawn to the postcards. As many of you know, I've been sending out postcards during the pandemic, including having started to reconnect with this friend through letters and such. That felt exactly right. So, I brought them home.


Image: An array of all sorts of colorful postcards.

I suppose all this is rather morbid? I blame being a Scorpio for my inability to be circumspect about death and dying. I have placed all the talk about the funeral under a cut, probably unnecessarily? But, because I have no idea, I'd rather err on the side of caution. 

ANYWAY.

I may poke Mason to see if he's up for a hike or not today. At least it doesn't feel like it should be too hot. 

Image: A to-go coffee cup with a sticker of a dog and the handwritten words, "to ward off cats."

I'm not sure if it's the saint himself that dislikes me or if I'm just on some Irish fey sh*t list, but I have had an interesting run of Saint Patrick's Days over the past couple of years. I was hoping that I'd written about and tagged these events in my DW, but I can't easily find a reference to them. One year, Mason walked into school, tripped on his own feet, and face planted so hard he broke his glasses and gave himself a roughed up face. I turned around (I'd been starting to pull out of the school lot,) and took him home. Another year, our breaks failed in the car just as we were dropping Shawn off at her work. I tried to get my mechanics to take my car, but they refused saying that there was so much rust in the undercarriage that they were afraid the car would drop out of its frame if they put it up on their lift, so Mason (who had not yet made it to school) and I left the car where it lay (to collect later) and walked to get some breakfast and then take the light rail home.

Both times we attributed our troubles to a lack of wearing green.

I warned my family this morning that they must wear green on pain of death today! 

YET, things still went... awry. 

I will say, on the scale of face plant to break failure, what happened today wasn't actually all that bad... it was just, as the kids say, a LOT.

First, I came home from the coffee shop with my coffees. I buy myself and Mason a latte and Shawn gets an iced chai.  I take mine out of the container, Shawn takes hers, and I usually leave Mason's on the dresser for himself to pick up when he's up and ready to start classes for the day. Well, for SOME REASON, our cat Willow decided that she wasn't able to reach the treats in the drawer of the dresser, so she would take it upon herself to knock things off until someone got them for her. 

Yep. Down went Mason's coffee.  ALL OVER THE FLOOR.

So, I cleaned that up. There may have been some gross sobbing because I was just frustrated because last night my usual computer decided to go belly up and I was just kind of generally mad at the universe. But, I didn't want Mason to be without coffee, so I went back. Hence the cup with the dog sticker and the magic words, "To ward off cats." My coffee shop has an online form where you can leave notes--presumably this is mostly used by people who want to dictate the temperature of their lattes or how soy their soy milk needs to be. I have always, instead, used it to pre-chat with my barista--from wishing them a happy day to "OMG, AM COMING BACK BECAUSE MY STUPID CAT JUST KILLED MY COFFEE."  So they had time to prep the cup before I came. Why they had doggo stickers at the ready, I am uncertain, but it was Very Nice of them.

Later this afternoon, Shawn and I decided to go for a drive to get out of the house. We have four bullets in our possession, which had been living in our safe deposit box. Why did we have bullets in our safe deposit box? Neither of us could remember. We know they came from a collection of Shawn's dad's things and we never entirely realized we had them because the were in a plastic box with some of Shawn's mom's jewelry.  Now, why Shawn's dad decided these four bullets were precious enough to hide among the family jewels, I have NO IDEA. The point is, we want to get rid of them, finally. We recently had to clean out our safe deposit box because the bank we used to have a box in is scheduled for demolition. I called the Ramsey County sheriff's office and was told I could bring them there to be safely disposed of... only when we took off today, I forgot the exact address. No problem, we thought, and plugged in Ramsey County Sheriffs office into GPS.

First off, I have to tell you that our GPS took us around downtown St. Paul, got us off on Mounds Boulevard and said, "Your destination is on the left" and turned itself off. To the left of us at that moment? A homeless camp. Since this wasn't even the right street name for the sheriff's office, we turned the GPS on again and she eventually led us to the one in downtown St. Paul.

When I went in there, however, they told me, no, only police stations take bullets.

Okay, so where is one?

Just down at the end of this collection of buildings, I was told. Great, so I walked over to the police station at the end of all the correctional facilities (surrounded by razor wire, by the way, presumably to ward off protesters as the murderer of George Floyd will be on trail soon,) and I get to the police station. They are not letting people in so there were two buttons, one to call the front desk marked with a bell and the other marked with a speaker. There were signs explaining that to get someone's attention you must first ring the bell and then use the speaker button while talking. I rang the bell. An officer then told me what I'd just read about having to press the button to speak.

Our conversation goes like this, and I could not make this up if I tried.

Me: "Hello! I was told I could dispose of some bullets here, is that true?"
Him: "Sorry, you want to do what?"
Me: "Dispose of some bullets."
Him: (long pause) "Food?"
Me: ????
Me: "No.... bullets. I want to dispose of bullets. Can I do that here?"
Him: "You want to bring in food?"
Me: ????? (thinking: how is this word even like the other???)

We do this one more time and he finally asks me to take my mask off, and I am shouting into the speaker that I have BULL-ETS and I want to GET RID of them. He finally tells me that I can't do that here and I have to have a cop come to my house if I want to hand over bullets. WHICH IS NOT WHAT I WAS EVER TOLD, BUT FINE. I left with the four stupid bullets still in my pocket.

Shawn and I laughed about this for the longest time after I recounted it to her and the ONLY THING I can imagine that the cop thought I said instead of bullets was possibly "donuts." And that... could not be more of a stereotype.

Especially on St. Patrick's Day.