Man, don't you just love a cheesy title?
It's raining in Austin. Pouring. I'm enjoying it - I love dramatic, gray days with thunder and lightning and rain pounding for hours. It's the kind of rain that makes you want to stay in bed and dream for a day. It's cooled the Hill Country off for now, and our plants are ecstatic.
I'm kind of hoping for a huge flood, the kind that rushes in and swallows a region whole, except without all the flood damage and traffic accidents and cars floating away and
Operation: Rescue! local newsbreaks and stuff.
Really, I'm just wishing for a snow day. We didn't have very many snow days in West Texas when I was little, maybe one a year, if we were lucky. Those days were the best - Mom let us sleep in, we'd run around in the one inch of snow and make snowmen that were 2 feet high and had a bandana instead of a hat and melted in about half an hour. We'd eat snow ice cream. Everything was bright and perfect for a day.
I'd be so happy to wake up one day, turn on the news, and find out that I unexpectedly could sleep in without feeling either sick, guilty, or both.
The bad news about the wet weather is that a plague of locusts (okay, fine, mosquitoes) have chosen our house as their temporary refuge from the rain. I'm convinced that they are having secret meetings on our back porch under the sunroof, strategically planning how they will swarm, attack, and quickly suck the blood dry of anyone who dares disturb them. I have not one, not two, but 12 bites on my body right now, and that's only counting from my right knee down. One bite is right smack in the middle of my foot - the bottom of my foot. I cannot even begin to explain how much this sucks.
I've discovered that meditation is not at all helpful when sitting in a meeting full of music industry people and the bottom of your foot itches so insistently that you would willingly pay to have your whole leg removed if it meant that the itching oh my GOD THE ITCHING would stop. It's also very hard to keep a straight face when someone uses the word abdominal in place of abominable in front of twenty people and you are so tired from concentrating on ignoring the itching that you have to fake coughing to cover up your laugh spasms.
Want more bug stories?
Tonight I went into our laundry room (it's in a separate little building attached to our house – how cute is that?) to, you know, do some laundry. Three roaches the size of my index finger were having a party on the dryer, sans chips and dip. Apparently I busted them when I flipped on the light, because I swear they all looked up at me with their beady little cockroach eyes in sheer panic -
hide the bong, man, one of them whispered. Little did they know that I have a clinically diagnosed allergy to the sight of cockroaches. Seriously. One look and my heart stops beating, my lungs quit working, and I nearly pass out on the ground.
(I think that explains how I got a 46 (out of a possible 100) on my insect collection in Mr. Swift's science class in junior high school. Actually, I had Mr. Swift three years in a row (for different levels of science, I didn't repeat the same class), and the second year I did an insect collection I got a 32. How could I possibly do worse the second time around, you ask? Well, you try sticking helpless, ugly little creatures that give you heart palpitations into a jar with a lethal but innocent looking cotton puff soaked in nail polish remover. The most heartbreaking part was taking the insect out of the jar the next day, their spindly legs frozen in terror, and sticking a needle right through the middle of their crispy little bodies. I mean, come on. I still have nightmares.)
(Also, I must add that I think getting a 46 on a project that counted for a huge part of my Biology grade taught me a very important lesson. That lesson? That you don't actually die if you fail. Nope. Life does not end. You do not go to jail. You wake up the next day and have to do it all over again, and the only time you'll ever really regret not fully participating in the mass murder of helpless food chain bottom dwellers is when you fill out your application to Harvard your senior year in high school and then you realize that "Holy shit! I failed that one six weeks of Biology, and then I didn't get into Honors Chemistry in high school, and then I didn't take Trigonometry because it wasn't required and I realized I wouldn't die or go to jail if I didn't take it, and also I dropped out of that Advanced Physics class, and now I'm graduating number 131 out of 600 and Harvard is going to laugh long hearty belly laughs when they open this application! Goodbye, illustrious law career. Hello, cruel world.")
Back to my allergy to looking at cockroaches. My older sister Sarah has a bit of a soft heart when it comes to creatures with legs. She can't bear to hurt them, or even hurt their feelings. Dogs, cats, mammals in general - I'm totally with her there, without question. But cockroaches? I draw the line. The last time she stayed with us I spotted a roach behind the microwave and nearly lost my mind. She talked gently to it, picking it up and depositing it (not far enough away from) the back door, and firmly admonished me for saying that it was big, scary and ugly.
"That roach has a mother," she said.
"That roach has a date with the bottom of my shoe," I replied.
Alright, enough of the gratuitous bug stories. I'm grossing myself out. Want to hear something fun now?
The
Austin City Limits Music Festival band listing is up!
Man. Poor Nancy Reagan. The woman has got to be exhausted, not to mention in grief. And it's only Wednesday. My heart goes out to her.
Lucy loves you |
