Everyday Stupidities

Greetings, one and all. Here's your status update for the fireplace project: The tiling is done, and as soon as I have a free day from work (Tuesday or Wednesday) I'll be grouting it. Expect loverly photos of that (with the rest of the hearth mess cleaned up!) next time. It's been a slightly eventful week (if you consider Tuesday your Saturday like I do) because this last Tuesday my bestie Chrome spent a couple days with me -- such a good host I was, I was tiling and he was watching -- and coming up this Tuesday an old goilfren will be in town for her neice's graduation so I may be able to give her that birthday card I forgot to bring when last I saw her. Additionally, I was knocked out of my socks yesterday when my dear friend back home Wayne sent me a scan of a poem I wrote him late one May night in 1987 (I remember doing it, I didn't remember the content, I didn't keep a copy for myself at that time) which he says has meant a lot to him over the years... some of the situations [and people] in his life that inspired this still exist, unfortunately. It was a total shock reading that twenty years and one month later. Sparing you my bad handwriting, I'll retype it for you:

in regard to the pendulum
(to Wayne... and brighter days)

when we were in love
we danced and dreamed
and when we touched
our passion screamed

then you dropped the axe on me
and my head was on the block
I craved so much to call you back
but we could never talk

I cried for a day or two,
my tear trax made a dark stain
which covered everything I owned:
my heart, my health, soul, and brain

but then I stopped the rainfall
and fought to see the sun
then you came back to hurt me --
my troubles have re-begun

make up your mind, you bastard
quit messing with my head
I want you or I want out
for all those tears I've bled.

This last week's stupidity has been my left foot and how it got messed up. Last Tuesday while Chrome and I were sitting around, these two young women walked by my house in a state of attention-grabbing garb. Obliging, I grabbed my camera out of my office and went out the front door to snap a shot. And when my left foot landed on the porch, it went sideways or something and down I went into the lawn. I was laughing too hard at the rediculousness of my foot going out on me -- I did not trip!! -- to feel anything at that moment, and I hobbled it to the front yard to take that picture, which worked out better than expected because the sweatpants one of them was wearing fell to her knees mid-stride. (White shorts underneath, don't get excited, but this is the sort of thing friends on Flickr have referred to as "the dangers of low-rise" or said that she's a "fashion-victim".) In the hours after the mishap, my ankle swelled up considerably and began to hurt -- and let me tell you, walking wasn't the real problem, the positions one's foot gets into while one is on their knees or crouching to glue tiles to brick was. In the days after the mishap, parts of my foot have bruised up, and my wife matched the color of the edge of my foot where the blood has welled up to the "wisteria" crayon in the Crayola box of 64. Say what you will but I want my kitchen to match my foot... that's practically the color we've decided on painting it in the future. I can finally feel my ankle bones again so the swelling must be subsiding.