There was a stack of particle board leaning against the wall in the office, and I needed to get to the outlet behind it. “I’ll just ease it out away from the wall,” I said to myself.

Have you ever tried doing that with a stack of wood? It gets heavier the farther it gets from vertical. I think the pull of gravity must be stronger, closer to the ground. (Yes, you guessed it. I never took physics.) Anyway, everything was fine until the boards reached about a 45-degree angle. Suddenly, I couldn’t hold them up any longer, and I couldn’t push them back toward the wall, either. So I dropped them on my leg.

NovySan was outside. “What did you do?” he asked.

“Dropped a stack of particle board on my leg. But I’m okay! Really!”

“Go get an icepack,” he said.

“No, no. I’m fine.”

“You have a show tomorrow,” he said. And I did. So I got an icepack. NovySan is very wise. And the bruise really wasn’t so bad – it didn’t affect the muscle at all.

I can’t say that for the one I picked up a few days later, when I sat on the corner of a metal filing cabinet at work.

Yeah. That shit hurt.

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Of course I could. I’ll never turn down a trip to La Cabana.

Since NovySan was parked behind me, we had to take his car. Like me, NovySan drives a classic Bug, and like mine, it’s got its little quirks. For instance, the only way to adjust the driver’s seat is to slide it forward, then fix it in place with a screwdriver. Well, it doesn’t have to be a screwdriver – but there’s a screwdriver in the map pocket that works very well for the purpose. It can be tricky in the dark, even using your husband’s cell phone as a flashlight (via the excellent TorchButton app), especially when said husband’s sunglasses keep falling out of the map pocket he keeps the screwdriver in. I got it done, though, released the park brake (maybe some other time I’ll talk about the day I didn’t do that, and drove 10 miles with the damned thing on), put the car in reverse, and started to back out of the driveway.

***CRUNCH***

“What was that?” NovySan asked.

“Your fucking sunglasses,” I replied. I could feel the tears starting. “I swear I put them back in the map pocket.”

“I hope they weren’t my favorite ones,” he said.

“I’m sure they were.”

I was right. They were his favorites. But they weren’t the ones from the map pocket. I had gotten those put away. And so now I don’t know if there’d been two sets of sunglasses in the map pocket, and I didn’t notice when the first pair fell out, or if they’d been next to the seat and fallen out when I opened the door. Either way, they were smashed, and I owe him a new pair of shades.

Edit: I should note that NovySan wasn’t that upset about his sunglasses. In fact, I was so upset about the sunglasses (because I do get frustrated with myself when I do stupid shit, like running over my husband’s sunglasses) that he had to go to some trouble to tell me that he wasn’t. “It’s okay,” he said. “The sunglasses don’t matter, because I was just sodomized by the Buddha, and so I’ve reached enlightenment.” That was just the beginning. There was more. By the end of it, I was laughing so hard I almost had to pull over. And dinner was excellent, as well.

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We’ll start with the shower. When our old handheld showerhead died, we replaced it with one of these – a dual showerhead that has both a fixed showerhead and a handheld one, and a little switch on the side that you toggle to get water out of either one, or both.

Now we’ll move on to the cat. I took her in this morning for a checkup (she’s really fairly healthy, but she’s 17 years old, and she’s had some problems recently). She’s gained quite a bit of weight, which is good, but she’s got fleas and she’s anemic. Actually, she’s more anemic than she was when she was thinner. “That might have something to do with the fleas,” the doctor told me. “I hate to say this, but I think you’re going to have to bathe her.”

Schokie’s no stranger to baths. She had her first when she was a tiny kitten who’d never learned to groom herself properly and, as a result, smelled terrible. She doesn’t like them (though she does enjoy the warm water, as long as she doesn’t think about what you’re doing to her), but she puts up with them. When I got home from the vet, I took off my shoes, jeans and top, and climbed into the shower stall with the cat. She knew what was coming, and she tried to escape, but since she’s not strong enough to open the door, I left her to bang her head against the glass while I finished getting ready for her bath.

“It might be hard to keep my bra dry,” I thought, so I pulled it off and tossed it over the door, where it landed in the cat’s litterbox. I started giggling. “If it makes you feel any better, Schokie,” I said, “I just threw my bra into your catbox.” She wasn’t impressed. Then I flipped the switch on the showerhead through two clicks, pulled the handheld showerhead out of its bracket, turned on the water – and got hit in the face with a spray of cold, cold water.

Shit. One click. It should have been one click, if I only wanted water out of the handheld. There’s water pouring out of both showerheads, my underwear (which I’d left on, thinking I was just going to bathe the cat, and not myself) are soaked, there’s so much water in my eyes I can’t find the switch to toggle it back a click, and I’m laughing so hard it scared the cat, who’s huddled in a corner staring at me.

Still, at least I remembered to take my glasses off.

This time.

*I lie. This is would actually be Part II. Part I, however, wasn’t labeled as such at the time, so we’ll split the difference and call this Part I (and a half). You’ll find Part I (and no half) here.

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From the time I was maybe 12 or 13, all the way through high school, I made some extra money in the summers shooting gophers in the horse pasture. Mom would pay me $1 a head for killing the squeaky little menaces, and never asked to see the corpses. One lovely, sunny morning, I was out in the eastern half of the pasture, near the road, when I spotted a gopher to the west of me. I fired. My aim was a bit low, and the bullet skipped off the hard-packed ground and ricocheted through the double pane of plate glass in the bow-fronted window of the house.

I didn’t realize it had happened until I came in and my father offered me the bullet. It was only a .22, so it hadn’t gotten far after punching through both panes of glass. He’d found it on the window seat. “Lucky for you that didn’t keep going and hit your mother’s china cabinet,” he said. “And that you hit the house, instead of one of your mother’s yearling foals.”

“Dad,” I said. “I would never aim toward the horses.”

Guess I shouldn’t have aimed toward the house, either…

I still have that bullet somewhere. Someday, I’m going to make a navel jewel out of it, like the dancer in The Man with the Golden Gun.

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