Haunting Stories of Cars and Projectile Vomiting

Last night sucked balls.

First, let’s start with the fact that I had to work late-ish. That is never a good way to start an evening. Then one of our temporary residents cooked dinner for us (damn him!) and it was good. (ARGH. Making me LOOK BAD.) Then he had the nerve to clean it all up!

Actually, it really did bother me, and this is how I know that I have become Totally Crazy, because I hate dishes. And this is not a secret. But when someone is in my house, and using my kitchen, and then starts cleaning while a movie is still playing it makes me feel Very Guilty. And so when I say, “please don’t,” and they say, “Oh, it’s no trouble, it will only take me a minute,” I feel obliged to stand up and stop watching the movie and help.

Right, I know, I have acknowledged that I’m Crazy. Let’s move on.

So instead of throwing the “woe is me, I can’t watch the lame movie that I really wasn’t paying attention to anyway” tantrum that I felt brewing inside me, I wiped down a couple dishes and then got in the car to go to the grocery store and call my brother and talk about things like house hunting and how he’s having trouble coming up with a half million dollars to buy four square feet of a rundown bathroom in California. Fortunately, what with the housing bubble finally popping, he’s hoping he may get an extra square foot or two, for that price. Hooray, a sink AND perhaps a place to stand, next to it!

So I got to the store, and got very wrapped up in our conversation about staying on his couch sometime in January that I just sat in my parked car, in my little parking spot in the grocery store, blathering on. Until some woman in a truck comes barreling down the row in the wrong direction, and begins this very complicated mover of turning and trying to back into the space that’s either the one in front of me, or the one next to it, I’m not sure, because she backs straight down the middle of the yellow line that’s supposed to divide the spaces. Almost crossing into a third space.

I pause, watching the circus act unfold, with a gut feeling that Something Bad is going to come of this, to the point that I make the comment to my brother, “I think she’s drunk.” And that is when she backed her truck right up into my PARKED CAR.

So with the east coast gangsta girl raging inside of me, I step out of my car in my cute, little Audrey Hepburn coat, glare at the large woman who is jumping out of her truck with two other women and is headed into the store, and scream, “The fuck you think you are doing? You just hit my PARKED car! I will cut you!”

Or, at least, that’s how it sounded in my head. What came out of my mouth sounded more like, “Erm, ‘scuse me? I think you’re over the line.”

“SO?” she snarled.

“So, you hit my car!” I finally squeaked.

“No I didn’t!” she raged, coming back to inspect.

Sure enough, our cars were touching.

She got back into her car, pulled it forward a couple of inches, and then got out, calling me a, “Fucking Bitch,” to her friends, very loudly.

Which makes sense, what with her being the fucking idiot who ran into my car that was just sitting there. No apology. No attempt to exchange information.

And if you know the kind of neighborhood that surrounds my grocery store, I doubt you would chase down someone who was significantly bigger and meaner than you at 9:00 at night in the parking lot there, either.

Not that there was any damage. A) The front of my car is already jacked, what with my feeble attempts at learning to do donuts when I lived up in the mountains (hint, make sure there are no, say, LARGE BOULDERS to run smack dab into, when you try it) and B) she really was only going about four miles an hour.

Still, my pride was mortally wounded, so I called my brother back, (somewhere in there I hung up on him) and filled the conversation with a lot of cussing and heavy sighing. He advised me to at least move my car, which I did, and then we chatted some more, and I came home to a clean kitchen and more work.

Fortunately, work is slowing down, now, some. And the past couple days have been highly successful, what with the DMV being something akin to a Disney World experience, compared to the Social Security office, (despite my signature looking like I want to become left-handed, along with becoming Mrs. Funasaurus) and we got a ridiculous amount of trick-or-treaters on Halloween, most of whom were in very clever costumes.

I don’t particularly like children, but I LOVE trick-or-treaters. I would like them to come to my house every night. And I would buy them candy every night, oh yes I would. Especially the little girl who was dressed as one of the Shrek babies in Shrek 3. (That movie was a horrible, hour + commercial for lunchboxes, with the only redeeming quality being the adorable, projectile-vomiting Shrek Baby characters.)



Her costume was totally homemade (the best kind) but a lot of effort had been put into the skewed antennae, the green face paint, and the large diaper. I would have given her all the candy I had left, if there weren’t more kids lined up behind her that I wanted to see.

And now, it’s finally the weekend.