The Hubcap Massacre

Yesterday was a scary driving day. 

I still didn't do any of the things I assumed I was going to do by now…

Like hit a bird,

or get smashed by a deer,



or destroy a mailbox,



and I haven't even knocked a side-view mirror off yet! 
 

YAY!

However, it IS Winter,
and the roads look like a giant infant took a hammer to them.
 

My father had trouble with a few potholes recently, so you'd think I would have seen this coming.

NOPE. 

Mom, after the fact, said she saw it… but we're going to ignore how that would have been nice to mention BEFORE I hit it.  Mom. 

*ahem*

So, I whacked a giant hole in the ground and while it sounded scary, most of the road had sounded scary, so I didn't think much of it. 

There were also so many potholes, some of which stretched across the whole area, so it was difficult to avoid them. 

Usually I'm the only one making horrible noises while I drive, but this time Mom chimed in.
 

You know that noise Lucile Ball makes on I Love Lucy? 
It was like that.  

Every.  Time. 

Still, not nearly as bad as the noises my father makes as soon as I get behind the wheel at all.  

Seriously, I could be parked and he'll still hit the imaginary brake on his side.

Anyway, I didn't know anything was horribly wrong until I went into a "lane" over on the side, thinking a car in front of me was in a turning lane, rather than, you know, parked.

Then another car came up next to me in the correct lane. 

I figured I was trapped and Mom and I would have to eat parts of the car to survive until we were rescued from my stupidity.

The man in the other car honked, which I assumed was an angry honk. 

It was not. 
I rolled down the window and he mentioned that our hubcap (read: Mom's hubcap that I slammed off of her poor car) was by the town hall, in a snow bank. 

Thank you, Stranger-Man. 

I had this weird swell of embarrassment from having been driving around with only three hubcaps. 

I pictured getting laughed at by more fashionable drivers.

Because Mom mentioned that I need to be careful with the next potholes so as not to damage the tire, my severe lack of car-knowledge showed.  

I was under the assumption that the hubcap was usually bolted on, keeping the tire in place. 
 

I imagined the tire now flying off without it's metal seat belt, and me going to some kind of car-jail for committing tire manslaughter. 

Anyway, Mom found the hubcap after wandering around a bit. 
 



This brings up a few questions. 

Did it fly off of the car into the snowbank? 

Did the kindly neighbors take the time to get out of their car to pick it off of the road and leave it where we could find it? 

Did they follow us that whole way to tell us, or was it by chance that they happened to see a car missing a hubcap later on and fill in the blanks? 

Either way, Mom and I weren't entirely positive we could put it back on right then and there, so she just plopped it in the car. 

I was still a little shaken by "OH MY FUCK I BROKE YOUR CAR I'M SO SORRY" so I asked her to do the driving until our next errand was done. 

I've been calling that my first accident just because I want that part of my life to be over with and it didn't involve anyone else being damaged.

Let me think this. 

Shhh...

Wednesdays and Driving Like an Adult

I should start this off by mentioning that I wrote this on a Wednesday, yet I'm posting it a day later at around eleven something PM.  
That should give you an idea of how Wednesdays go for me. 
 
I'm becoming like a syndicated cartoon strip, with how much I hate Wednesdays. 

I still have to take the road test to get my license (and get a car) and Wednesdays are the day everyone seems to be most busy. 
This year, I've had class every Wednesday. 
This means, every Wednesday has been me totally alone…
 

and then suddenly off to school.
 

This wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't had the anxiety issues and all that.
I wound up just kind of doing nothing all day every day last semester, unless I had somewhere to be.  

I was fine once people were home… but yeah.  It was a pretty bad semester. 
 
Of course, next week will be awful, even though Rob is home all day, but that is for the opposite reason.
 
Bored is awful.

Busy is awful. 

Next week, we have a meeting together, then I have an interview in another town, and then I have class. 

Why does everything have to happen on Wednesdays?
 

Either way, I am aware that I need to start driving.  

This need does not change the fact that I don't want to and have never really wanted to.
Owning a car sounds awesome, without the insurance costs and all that. 
I just don't wanna drive it. 

To alleviate my automatic fear, I tend to make Mario Kart-like noises, especially on turns.
 

…

They can't fail me for that on the road test, right? 

I will say, I'm not an awful driver, despite my fear.  

I even avoided an accident yesterday when a woman came peeling out of a side street without looking.
 

I'm not afraid of dying in a car, by the way.
I'm afraid of being maimed.  Losing a limb… 

Hurting the car someone else owns is also on that list of fears. 
 

*sigh*
…
I hate Wednesdays. 

Lost Like This

My sense of direction has never been fantastic. 

It is the real reason why a smaller campus is nice for me, though I'll admit that I've certainly gotten lost within small campus areas too. 

…Okay, within buildings.  I've gotten lost within a building or five.

Like, this one building on the smaller of my college campuses might as well be like that Escher painting. 
 



Once, as an undergrad, I got lost on the other side of campus because I had gone to the other dining hall. 

I had to call my friend from home, who had been there maybe once, to tell me how to get back to my dorm.
 

Of course, I had gotten stuck in my own dorm at one point before that… 
 

This one Summer, I was taking a class for college at my old high school.  

I figured, "Yeah, I remember this place.  It'll be a breeze getting around."

First of all, that saying, "You can't go home again" can mean a lot of things. 

In terms of my old high school, it means some major renovations were being made and the entire thing not only looked very different, but was actually being gutted at the time. 

So, after my class, I go to leave.  
I remember that the doors lead, you know... out. 

…And, technically speaking, they did. 

The problem was that "out" did not mean out to the parking lot. 

Out, in this case, meant out into a wasteland of mud and construction equipment. 

I like to think the equipment was just as confused as I was.
 

It was also raining, hence the dirt being mud. 

I turned to go back inside, but the door was locked. 

…

The door that I had just gone through was locked to the outside. 

I imagine I looked like this, trying to get back in:
 

With no other choice, I turned to see if I could some how climb may way out, back into society. 

I began to sink into the mud.

Not only was it really, super gross, but I also was working under the assumption that I was going to die there and be buried like some horrible time capsule. 

"This seems to be a college girl.  What was she doing back then in the 2000s wandering around a high school?  We may never know…" 

I actually don't remember how I got out, but I know that I was very distraught and disturbed when I went back to my parent's house. 

The sandals I had been wearing were given to the gods as sacrifice. 
 

I don't know why I thought that would be easy.  

I mean, even when I WAS in high school, I never knew where I was going.  

I'd carry around my schedule every day and ask my teacher EVERY DAY how to get to the next class.  

I was late most of the time, so I stopped going to my locker at all, except for before and after lunch.
 

I'd switch my school bag with my lunch box, then my lunch box with the other half of my school stuff for the rest of the day. 

Of course, this brilliant process is why I often did my homework, yet managed to not have it to hand in.

Middle school was even worse, because even if I had known where my locker was, (which I never did) I wouldn't have known the combination to my lock anyway.
 

I still have dreams where I'm lost and looking for my damn locker. 

I get lost in wide open spaces too.  I get lost in stores and panic the moment whoever I'm with is behind a display or something, thinking I'll be lost forever. 

Panic probably doesn't help the lost thing… 

I've learned to at least ask or pretend to know where I'm going until I figure it out, but I still feel like I'm always wrong about which direction I should go. 

…There's a metaphor in that, I'm sure.

It's a Snake!

Over the years, my family had a lot of pets.  This was mostly because of my sister.  

This means that some lived well past the age that anything should be alive, and others dies really horribly.  I have a thousand stories about guinea pigs, birds, dogs, cats, fish and so on...  

This post is reserved for snakes and rats... and a gerbil. 

That poor gerbil. 

For snakes, we had Trent, Lilith and still Wally.

Wally is a Western Hog-nose and he has lived WAY LONGER than they are supposed to live. 

He looks like this: 

Trent was a Burmese Python.   He got to be about ten feet long, I think, before we realized that we couldn't really take care of him, lest he eat the other animals.  

He was named for Trent Reznor of NIN and at one point bit my mom in the face.  

Mom was fine.  

I was terrified. 

Lilith was a Ball Python and you can actually read about my special relationship with her here! 

Mom has always been fearless when it comes to the snakes and actually takes them in to show her students.  

nooo...

One of them got stuck in a couch at one point.  It was one of those fold out bed couches.  

There was an adventure getting the snake out.  

In any case, at some point, we started breeding rats to feed the snakes.  I don't know if this was always on purpose, but either way, we wound up with too many.

This was partly caused by late bloomers.  

See, we'd separate the male from the female, but every now and then there would be a male who's balls hadn't dropped yet, and we'd think it was a lady rat:

Until he was going around screwing his mom, sister and aunts.

Even before the breeding happened, I was getting accustomed to hating snakes based on the fact that I didn't like worms and I loved rodents.  Rodents are fuzzy and cute and don't do this: 

It became a common thing when friends were over or just because my sister assumed I'd want to watch this happen.  Since I had trouble talking in a clear enough way to make a point, I'd just kinda suck it up and cry as I sat for the show.  

I remember being extra confused because my sister took great joy in feeding the snake, but claimed to love the rats too.  

She was such an animal lover that she was a member of animal rights groups and talked about throwing red paint on fur coats.  

(Which would actually be really stupid because a well kept fur coat can last for generations, whereas someone who had one already would probably just buy another one if theirs was ruined, so those animal rights activists are actually murdering more creatures every time they do that.  Just saying.) 

Eventually, one of our snakes started to tire of rats.  That was how I got my pet rat, named for the star of Willard. 

See, my family put the rat in the tank with the snake, but the snake did nothing.  

They drank the same water and just kinda hung out for a few days.  The rat would even sleep on top of the snake. 

So, the snake moved on to gerbils for a bit.  

And once, my family fed the snake two gerbils at once.  

The snake ate one while the other looked on in horror.  

 ...and then it freaked out and ate half it's own tail off. 

Well, the tactic worked, because the snake didn't want anything to do with that gerbil.  I called him Frodo from then on out.  

It gets worse.  

My family had no sense of what torture really was, so they set up this gerbil to also be a pet, having been rejected as food...  

And put the tank right next to the snake. 

Before all that, we "briefly" had a Garter snake and a Grass snake.  

...We don't talk about those much, as one was a little traumatic for my poor father.  

There was tape involved.   It was a learning experience.  

Anyway... 

I'm not a fan of snakes. 

Adventures in Fabric: Bottoms Up!

Okay, so it's true that I do sew, and I like creating stuffed animals and I do occasionally attempt altering clothing.  
Soon, I'll be attempting a dress from a pattern.  

This is scary.

So, in the meantime, I'm showing you other successes and failures in my wardrobe!  Yay!

To begin with, PANTS.

First, we have a pair which I had loved to death.  GIANT holes in the knees of these ultra comfy pants upset me.  They were also covered in paint, which happens to everything I own.  

For a while, I was wearing pajama pants underneath them, but they'd bunch up and be a pain to get on and off.  

I decided to just cut the Hell out of the pajamas and sew them underneath to the pants themselves as patches from the inside: 

 

Then (and a little before) I used fabric paint to make a bloody horror look, like someone had sliced off my knee caps.  

Next up is a pair that fit me reasonably well, were cheap, and I was bored...

So I sliced them up on purpose, added the fabric paint from both sides as "blood" and stitched them back together with thick, black thread.  Zombie pants! 

 A better look:

 The back:

Finally (as far as "horror pants" go), there were pants on sale that were normally pretty expensive ONLY because they came with pre-made holes.  I determined that there would be no reason for such holes unless they were bullet wounds, so this occurred:

 Really finally, the Bat-Pants.  These pants were also well loved and full of holes achieved in battle, and the patches are just cut outs from really soft men's underwear.  I had bought them for a boyfriend who didn't want to entertain me by wearing them, so I repurposed them:  

I have too much time on my hands! 

Weeeee!  

Meat Sauce

So, my mother is like an escaped Disney Princess.  She really is.  Everything she says and does and how she looks and sounds... Yep.

...And then I see this:

This looks like something you'd find in a serial killer's fridge.

"Lazagha"  I think that's supposed to be lasagna. 


I should film a horror movie and just call it "Lazagha" and not say why.


...



This is what gave birth to me.  


...


and I just-