36 hours in the life of ...

Here is a rundown of my last 36 hours --

Friday
6:00 a.m. -- awaken, morning routine
8:00 a.m. -- leave for work, get stopped by random train downtown
8:38 a.m. -- arrive to work (late). get ushered into my new "office" upstairs.
8:45 a.m. - 4:36 p.m. -- proofread cement prices, finish cement press release, proofread principal website, write copy for principal leadership website main page
4:36 p.m. -- Boss is shocked that I finished last project in less than 20 minutes. She tells me to leave. I do, gladly.
5:00 - 7 p.m. -- Home. Family leaves for three days in Arkansas after a two-hour goodbye ceremony (involving multiple reentrances for bathroom breaks, pillows, medicine and chocolate cake (Lexie)).
7:20 p.m. -- shower.
7:40 p.m. -- Carly picks me up. We drive to Barnes and Noble, where we meet with a friend who I haven't spoken with in two years. This wasn't a case of busy schedules not matching up. This was a case of purposeful avoidance on both of our parts.
8:10 p.m. - 10:52 p.m. -- Perry arrives. Meetup goes swimmingly. Girl stands up to leave. We hug. The olive branch has passed.
10:55 p.m. -- Sonic, to stave off Perry's hunger.
11:20 p.m. - 1 a.m. -- Carly's house. Try to get 1970s VCR to work. Fail. Go upstairs and watch 11-year-old Carly and her friend in a Six Flags' music video. Carly has her shorts hiked up to her chest. Oh, 1997. By popular vote, we choose Jumanji as our movie du jour.
1:04 a.m. -- Hug Perry goodbye. I won't see him till Christmas, as he leaves for Kenya tomorrow, and I'll be back at school when he returns for a few days before school starts up for him in London. Carly drives me home. Get out of car, dragging a garbage bag of clothes she wants me to try on. Walk in garage. See chicken roosting on four-wheeler gear shift. Curse loudly and throw garbage bag in house. Go back outside and look around for deadly weapon. Decide on Dad's driver, located in golf bag. Swat chicken off four-wheeler and out of garage (nicely). Comment on fact that my life resembles Sanford and Son. Collapse in bed.

Saturday
12:30 p.m. -- Good morning! Crawl out of bed. Have missed five phone calls at this point. Shower.
2:15 p.m. -- Come downstairs to eat lunch. Girl whose mom boards horses at our house is sitting at our kitchen table, drawing a picture with crayons. This is not unusual. She says it's for me. I ask her to hang it on the refrigerator. Girl asks to go play downstairs. I say, whatever. Doorbell rings. Girl's brothers. Each wants glass of water. Sigh.
2:45 p.m. -- Finally ready. Put on shoes to go. Amy and I are heading out back door. Doorbell rings. Girl asks if she can answer it. I say yes, since it's probably for her anyway. I talk her through the deadbolt. Door swings open. Boys run in yelling - CALL 911! Our mom fell off a horse! I am the practical one. I open my mouth to ask further questions, and Scott grabs the phone and dials 911. Then he hands it to me and settles back into his Lifetime movie. Dispatcher asks what happened. I tell her that a woman fell off a horse. Then she starts asking specifics. I have no idea, obviously, as I haven't seen her yet. Somehow her sons, who are about 12 and 15, are unsure as to whether she's conscious. That was frustrating.

Hang up phone. Scott says, "At least pretend like you care." I glare at him. Contemplate running down to the barn to check on her or attacking him with the blender. I choose to go down to the barn, leaving Concerned Brother to his TV movie.

Horse Lady is laying in the pasture, sitting with her head in her hands. I'll be honest - my first thought was, She's sitting up and I just called 911?! She couldn't stand up, she said, because she was too dizzy. EMT arrives in a pickup truck, wearing a black wifebeater. Two ambulances arrive minutes later. Neighbors appear from their houses. I meet the new neighbors next door. Horse lady is placed on a board. She is not happy, and keeps wanting to stand up. She tries and then starts to fall. She then throws up, multiple times. Her 6-year-old daughter, the one who drew me the picture, stands by making helpful comments like, "Mom, that saddle needs a seatbelt!" and "I think that horse needs a timeout." Her brothers tell her to shut up. An EMT asks the oldest son what he thought happened to the horse. "He spooked!" he replied. "It could have been the chickens -- or the sheep!" Sheep? Is this really my life?

I wander over to the fence, where my sister Amy is talking to the two neighbor kids. We watch respectfully as the EMTs work to tear my dad's fence apart. I shudder. "Ashley, what are we supposed to do?" Amy whispers. "I don't know," I whisper back. "Mom only left us instructions on how to do the laundry."

EMTs convince Horse Lady to go to the hospital. Another EMT drives Horse Lady's van with her four kids. They leave. The neighbors leave. Tranquility is restored.

Amy and I walk back up the house. I begrugdingly whine, "All I wanted was to go to the library today." That seemed to sum up our afternoon.

4:10 p.m. -- Arrive at library, armed with summer reading list I made during work the previous day. Check out The Alchemist, A Tale of Two Cities, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Soooo excited to start reading them! Amy and I walked out to the car. We were about to pull away when I looked to my right and saw a familiar-looking woman in the car next to me. "Hey," I said, "Isn't that the lady who always walked around undressed in the women's changing room at the pool?" The lady straightened up in her chair so we got the full-on profile look. Confirmed. She looks a lot different with clothes on.
4:30-5:30 p.m. -- church.
6:00 p.m. -- Amy and I made dinner - pasta with broccoli, yum!
7:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. -- video store

Annnd... Horse Lady just called and her tests came back OK. Yay!

Cemented in my brain

Nothing's better than wisdom imparted to you by your dad in front of the kitchen sink.

"Washing dishes by hand is like changing a baby's diaper," says the father of eight, swiftly scrubbing a discarded bowl of cheesy tuna casserole. "Pretty soon you'll be able to change a diaper with one hand and eat a sandwich in the other."

I think that stopped me from wanting children in the future. Or wanting sandwiches, for that matter.

I started one of my jobs yesterday. My boss told me to come in at 10 a.m. so we could figure out my work schedule. Okay. I come in and my boss is on the phone, so another coworker ushers me into the conference room. "So I hear you're working all day Thursdays and Fridays!" she says. Really? I'm glad I had a say in that. The three of us sit in the conference room for a bit, tying bows for a display project. After we're done, my boss shows me my desk and assigns me to write 10 press releases. Then the other coworker adds two more projects. REALLY?! Because I thought I just came in to discuss my work schedule!

So what I expected to be a 30-minute meeting turned into a seven-hour affair. You want to know what I did all day? I wrote press releases on cement. CEMENT. I think I do okay with frilly, descriptive writing, but testing me with cement is cruel and unusual. I thought my brain was going to implode. Each press release was to be three descriptive paragraphs about the product. What do you write - that cement product C is a little bit harder than cement product B? Oh, my Lord.

Today was a bit better. I got moved upstairs to the loft, which I like because it's my own funky little space. My boss told me to make myself at home, so I took off my heels, laid down in this extremely comfy chair, placed my head on one armrest and my knees on the other, steadied my red marking pen in one hand and a stack of cement list prices in the other and promptly almost fell asleep. I decided that maybe the ginormous chair wasn't such a good idea after all, so I moved closer to my caffeine-laden Coke Zero instead.

Maybe I'm not cut out for ... work. Or maybe - what I suspect is closer to the truth - I just really, REALLY want a paid position. And maybe I also want to stretch my brain to depths further than punchy adjectives describing freaking cement.

Mistaken identity

I meet with Laura, my boss at the advertising agency, tomorrow to work out my schedule. I meet with Diane, my boss at ALA (aka TB history) next Tuesday. I accepted, so this is my first summer with a "real" job. Maybe I'll be so impressive at the advertising agency that they'll pay for more than downtown parking, too.

My family is going to Arkansas this weekend to stay with one of my mom's good friends and former business instructor. That would be Mom, Dad, Kevin, Lyndsey and Lexie. Basically, with only four kids left in the house, I'm going to feel like an only child. I'm not sure what I'll do with myself. Maybe I'll lay out if it's nice. Even on the beautiful days, I have SUCH A HARD TIME just going out to the pool and laying down. I just need to move around. I can control myself when a friend's over, but not when I'm by myself. I'm sure the gusting wind doesn't help me stay in place either. There were upwards of 25 mph gusts today, and we live on a hill. You can't even walk outside without careening sharply to whichever way the wind is blowing.

I just finished a book my friend Erin loaned me for the summer. It's called "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath. The heroine of the story, Esther Greenwood, slowly goes insane, and then tries, on several occasions, to commit suicide. This closely mirrors the author's life, except that she actually succeeded in killing herself at age 31. It's scary because you can see the psychotism (invented?) building. I always worry that I have that button in my head, too, and I'm afraid it will be pressed. I think I tend to overreact to sensitive situations - be it mine or other people's - but still. I feel like I understand the intricacies of mental illness more than I would like to.

I'm slowly easing my way into the summer routine. I think it will be better when my schedule is structured by the two jobs. I'm really excited about starting up school again in the fall. I think it will be so great to be a TA, and I'm so excited I was picked. Of course, hopefully by then I will have cemented my post-graduate study plans. I've been thinking law school for a few months now, and that seems to have stuck. Right now, I'm thinking a divorce attorney or a sexual harassment/abuse attorney. Sooo random, but I think it would be very rewarding to help people get their lives back in order. We'll see. It's fun (right now) to have so many options.

I went up the office yesterday afternoon to see if my dad needed any help. I was up there for two minutes before I was like, "Geez, Dad, how do you stand this? It's boiling in here!" And he said, idly, "Oh, is it? I hadn't really noticed. I'll open the windows again. Amy was mowing the yard, and I couldn't hear the phones over the noise." I stared at him, gaped mouth. "Are you kidding me?" He said, "No! I didn't even know she knew how to mow on the zero-turn. I looked out the window and saw her zipping around the trees." I was like, "Dad, I can't tell if you're messing with me or not." And he said, "No, she really was!" I lifted up my tanktop a little bit so that he could see the bits of grass still stuck to my black shorts. "THAT WAS ME."

I can't even get credit for my slave labor. I kid. I adore mowing the yard. It's a little unnerving how Amy and I are (quickly) morphing into the same person.

Kevin got a $425 check in the mail today. He won a full scholarship for art camp this summer. He actually had a butterfly painting displayed at a gallery in St. Louis last year. I did make fun of him for the butterflies, of course. I now call him Boy Genius.

We have 13 new baby kittens. Yes, that's THIRTEEN. Addison has one, a black fluffy named Midnight (also Bubbles, RIP). Fuzzy has six - two grey, two black, two white. So cute, but annoyingly squeaky. Then there are two more sets down at the barn, two blacks and one white in each. I really enjoy going out to play with them. I'm starting to understand my little sisters a bit more, too, because I find that whenever I get frustrated now, I make a hissing noise. Amy pointed this out to me. It should bother me, but to be honest, I kind of like it.

"That lady said 'Excuse me,' so I squeezed in my buttcheeks." -- Amy

Is it August yet?

No, no, no. It hasn't been that bad - just hectic. Maddie came home with me Sunday. We weren't sure if she would be able to because it looked like she was going to regionals. As of early Saturday afternoon, she was in 12th place in the D1 Central Regionals. As of late into my Saturday night shift on the copy desk, however, she was holding her own in last place for being disqualified. She told me later that she was on the 13th hole, picked up her ball and then realized it wasn't hers. It had been almost identical to her ball - brand, special markings, purple circles, and all, but it had a couple of extra lines on it. Immediate DQ.

That's OK because she made up for it when she played my dad on Monday. We went to a golf course in town that sponsors an annual LPGA tournament. Fittingly, Annika Sorenstam, a fellow Swede, won last year's. Maddie outshot my dad by 12 strokes on a course he's been playing for nearly 30 years. I was in charge of keeping score. Maddie did everything else, including driving the golf cart. She also kept me giggling as she told me exactly what my dad was going to do on each stroke. "He's going to pull left on this one," she confided. "A common mistake." Sure enough! I even got a few shots in myself. Maddie placed a ball four feet from the hole, and I managed to get a par! I think I'm a natural.

We had a lot of fun, going out to eat at Darcy's, swimming in the pool with the kidlets, playing with our 13 new baby kittens, watching Simon Burch downstairs on the projecter screen while stuffing our faces with popcorn and pretzels. Lexie took Maddie and me down to the barn, where she proceeded to chuck large rocks at the chickens, causing a large raucous. Don't worry - I dragged her out by her arm before the roosters could peck her eyes out.

I had an interview today for a research project on the history of tuberculosis in Illinois, from 1900 to present. Apparently there are 200 cases a year here; I didn't realize it even existed. To be honest, all I know is that it's a bacteria because that's what the woman told me. I think I'm going to accept because I could work with Carly. And make a couple of thousand bucks. And work with Carly!

Speaking of Carly, I'm driving to Chicago to pick her up from O'Hare tomorrow. I haven't seen her in four-and-a-half months. Good thing I'm kind of used to this by now, since I'll be playing the 'traded in for a Filipino Spaniard' game again next semester. I can't say I blame her, though - foreign tongues are hot.

My sister's glasses are hot, too, and that's why I'm wearing them. Same prescription, same brain, same cynical sarcasm - is it possible to have two soulmates? Actually, I think I have at least a handful. Too bad none of them are boys.

Warning: Picture of foot enclosed.

So using Carly's style of accurately estimating percentages, I am 134.2389% positive that I just broke my right foot. OWWWWWWWWW.

I was in the shower, and I had just extracted a handful of conditioner. I placed the bottle of conditioner back on the rack, and I proceeded to work the goop through my hair. WHEN ALL OF A SUDDEN, completely out of nowhere, the bottle of conditioner jumps from the rack and stabs itself into my foot. Twice.

Now, granted, this wasn't a normal bottle of conditioner. It was unusually large because I like them that way, and because I go through them more quickly than the average person. Also, I think I had been overzealous in my squeezing because the suspect bottle of conditioner was so tightly wound that the front and back almost touched in the middle of the bottle and all of the conditioner was engorged on the sides. If you can imagine.

And just because I am often accused of embellishing my stories to make them sound cooler, I have enclosed a picture. Doesn't it look like the marks of Christ?



My foot apologizes for not being properly done up. My toenail polish is a mess because I didn't realize that today would be a photo op.

Also, you may be able to see a bruise on the left side of my foot, a little below the stigmata. That's from yesterday. Yes, this has happened before.

P.S. If anyone dares to make fun of my long toes, I will never speak to you again.
P.P.S. The second picture is 10 hours post-incident.

Ne'er were truer words spoken ...

The first sentence in an e-mail from my journalism professor when informing me of my standing in his class (and remarking on my final 12-page paper) --

"I have to say you are one of the more unusual subjects."

I'm not sure what this means exactly, but I have no doubt it's true.

P.S. I got an A in the class. Yay!