A tale of theft, vomit and the Department of Motor Vehicles

Oh. My.

Run away, friends.  Run far, far away.

I'm afraid my streak of bad luck has reached its peak and who knows who will next be snared in it's gnarly claws of doom!!!

Save yourselves!!

Pure Luck: the Stacie Lucas story

I'm writing this as a weekend update, even though the weekend is far from over and we'll be hitting another one before I'm even ready.

I only just this morning felt well enough to go to work after a stomach bug hit me Sunday and left me flat on my back, unable to stand for even thirty seconds without severe stomach pains.  So here I am, on Wednesday, feeling like it's Monday, trying to get my whole self used to the fact that it is hump day and tomorrow will be the day before the day before the weekend, and....no, you're right, that really isn't too big of a hassle.

So before I ramble any further about something that has nothing to do with anything...

***

Corey and I have been in the process of buying a townhouse since late February.  As most homeowners know, these things take awhile.  You know, with the bank stuff and the title stuff and insurance and blah, blah, blah.  As most homeowners who are married to me now know, when I'm involved the whole process is excruciating.

Where art thou, Lady Luck?!

"They're not all like this," our realtor explained.  "This is the worst I've ever seen."

Great.  I'll try to remember that when I never, ever move ever again.

Our closing was scheduled for this past Monday afternoon.  It was originally set for early April but with so many additional requirements and lost (but later found!) paperwork we were relieved last week to finally have a set date to own our home! 

Everything was finally going to be over!  And done!  And we could pop champagne!  And potty in our new toilets!

Oh, ho, ho naive little ones...

This girl had to lose her wallet on Saturday.  Wait, no, I set it down at Coldstone Creamery and then someone swiped it.  But in my defense, I had to carry my ice cream aaaaand Corey's milkshake.  My subconscious made the difficult decision: dessert comes first, wallet must wait. 

I had money in my wallet, and credit cards, and my work ID, and my driver's license.  Annoying.  So, so annoying.  I canceled my credit cards right away.  And I fumed about losing my weekend garage sale money on a day when there was a ten family sale down the street.  Ten families, I said!! 

My coffee club cards were in there too, and I was this close to getting a free coffee any size at Coffee Planet.  I had big plans for that free coffee, a java chip frappe.  A frappe I said!!

Sigh.

So, my driver's license was gone.  And being a first time home-buyer I didn't know the bank would like to see it and verify I am who I say I am before handing over my house.  Imagine that.  So there I sat Monday morning in my jammies, immersed in Lifetime movies and a heating pad with nothing left in my stomach to, um, expel when I got the call from Corey.

Hey, you're gonna need your license...

Uh oh.

The next two hours was a blur of yelling, rummaging, running up and down stairs, sobbing at the DMV, and lots and lots of gagging and body cramps.

Go get a temporary license from DMV....see if they'll print a picture on the temporary,be really nice....wait, let's look for your passport....where's your passport?.....I think it's at my mom's house....call your mom.....mom can you look through my stuff?.....wait I found it....don't worry, mom, we found it, p.s. sorry you're sick too....oh no it's expired!....can we use it anyway?....no? CRAP....ok, go get your license....ok, I need to take a puke bucket....wait do you have your Purdue ID?.....at my mom's house....call your mom....mom can you look through my stuff?.....no time, go to the DMV and get your license....mom, forget about it p.s. sorry to make you almost throw up climbing up the stairs to look through my stuff....ok, where's my puke bucket? can you get me some water for the road?....is this the right application?.....yes.....my (sob, sob) wallet was (sob) stolen and I'm supposed to (sob, sob, sob, sniffle) close on my house in forty-five minutes!!....here ya go hon'....that's it?!.....that's it....Corey I got it....that's it?....yep, that's it....ok, um, you gonna take a shower?....yes....ok hurry.

I call that the Reader's Digest version.

We get to the closing four minutes late with my birth certificate to prove the picture on my expired passport is really me, my marriage license to prove the person on my passport and birth certificate is the new, married me, my Social Security card to show I'm documented, and my temporary driver's license just for the hell of it.  We crossed our fingers.

In the end the bank could not have cared less.  I'm sure they would have taken a kindergarten self-portrait.

Of course.

Of course!

***

So that, my friends, is the recent installation to the story of my no good, very bad luck.

It was nice knowing you, now run for the hills before I cause generations of early onset baldness or an outbreak of feline AIDS in your subdivision.

My weekend in a tweet

So over the weekend I flew to the moon and had tea with the queen and then I took a nap before I saw the Rolling Stones perform a special concert just for me because I called Mick and was like "what's that song you sing where you do that thing...??"

It was a slow weekend.

....

Have you noticed I never, ever post a recap of my super, awesome weekend adventures?  Now that I've dragged myself back on the blogging wagon I've given you something for your dreaded Mondays, but do you ever wonder what could I possibly be doing in those two days where the world is mine to do whatever I want with it, granted that anything is whatever can fit into one-and-a-half days because I do need my Sunday evenings to unwind by folding laundry in my jam-jams?

You're curious.

I can sense it.  I'm good at reading people.  That's why my friends call me Stacie Sixth Sense Lucas.

But they don't say it 10 times fast.  It's kind of a mouthful.

Now that I've made you aware of your curiosity and my mystique I kinda hate bursting both our bubbles by telling you the reason I never give weekend updates is because they're so lame I fall asleep even thinking about them.

Best part of this past weekend: finding a pair of kelly green matchstick jeans for 40% off the already reduced price.  Bam.

Best part of the weekend before: I was given a coupon written on receipt paper for buy-one-get-one-free coffee by a man who called me pretty and said he could help me pick out a good non-alcoholic wine at his wine store after I told him, not sure how we got on the subject, that I can't hold my liquor.

And the weekend before that: I got bangs.

You'll be glad I don't do wrap-ups after next weekend; my mom has recruited me to pick up dog turds in her back yard.  Imagine that play-by-play.

I don't remember Corey and I having so little going on last year at this time, but it seems like I go into mental hibernation when the weather goes below 45 degrees so this could be a typical early spring boring routine for us that I just don't remember.  Come late May when flowers start to bloom (yes I said start to bloomohmigoshhowImissSoCalweather) we'll have trips to camp, vacations, hikes, BBQs, baseball gamesgoYanks! and, if I have my way, kayaking all over that Saratoga Lake.

But until then I'll just have to find some enjoyment in green jeans and dog poop.

And lunch dates with her majesty.

When I thought I was going to die....and ate six burritos

"That balcony is going to come crashing down on top of me."

"And this crowd is going to cause a stampede and I'll be trampled."

"Also, there's no fresh air in here.  I'm going to catch lung cancer."

I said this one day last August.  I'm a real peach.

But in my defense how can you really be sure of the structural integrity of a building, am I right?!

This is the story of my first Phish concert.

Also my last.

Maybe that was obvious.

Last year Phish, Corey's favorite band from yesteryear, rolled into town for a weekend of shows at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, an outdoor amphitheater with limited indoor seating.

That's cool.  Sounded like a swell time; a big group of adults in professions like accounting, and law, and elementary education all coming together to sway to the easy beats of a group that's been around for-ev-er, like from when all those adults were hacky-sack bouncin' college students who could grow thick, manly goatees and wear dirty Birkenstocks all the time.

Sweet.

Easy.

Of course I said, "hecks yeah, darling, I'll experience a major part of your youth!"

Maybe it was more like, "sure."

But either way, I looked forward to going to this concert!  We had tickets for actual seats; after a less than pleasant experience at a Third Eye Blind concert in Fort Wayne I have an aversion to crowded, mosh-pit environments. (shout out to my Colosseum EMS boyz, whoop whoop!) 

So I thought, tickets, that means we have seats, that means I can sit back and relax and enjoy the music.  Nice.

Yes, I am that naive.

The night of the concert I knew I was in trouble before we even left the parking lot.

"You can really FEEL the music, man, it's like in your DNA..."

"Corey, did you hear that??  That woman just said this music is in her DNA for crying out loud...what is this you brought me to?!?"

Don't let that fool you, I really did enjoy watching the pre-show festivities.  There were people jamming on guitars, others dancing, this was a whole new experience for me!

And then there was "Shakedown Street."

Oh.  My.  Stars.

In one of the main parking lots a number of vendors set up shop in two long rows selling everything you wouldn't find at your local craft show.  You know, bongs, pipes, and other "paraphernalia."  Nerd alert: "Ohmigosh they can sell that here?!"  This was all scattered between ordinary things like tie-dyed everything and rocks turned jewelry. I had to hold on to Corey's shirt in some parts of Shakedown Street there were so many people.

So many different types of people!  It was like going to a class reunion seeing the older, original fans, the ones who, like Corey and his friends with us, have been fans all along.  But a lot of them were newbies, the second generation fans who were literally babies when these guys first toured.

Young and old alike, in harmony, on a slack rope.

So much to take in.

Literally.

As in, there was a whole lotta food in this dusty, dirty parking lot.

Food vendors were everywhere selling burritos, pita things, questionable meat-on-a-stick.  I use the term "vendor" loosely as I am pret-ty sure they violated every single health code on the books and would never, ever, ever be granted a permit to "vend."  But this didn't stop me from buying the best vegetarian tacos sold out of the back of a van from a burly hippie I've ever tasted.

After all this you might be wondering if we ever made it to the concert.

We did!

We waded through a sea of people to get into the park, found our seats, found out our "seats" were also shared by several other people then waited for the festivities to begin.

Thirty minutes later we made our way out of our row, up the theater ramp, grabbed a handful of chicken burritos, pizza and hamburgers before heading out the gates and back to the car.

I made it a whole thirty minutes.

Em-barrassing...

But I couldn't move!  I couldn't breathe!  And I swore the walls were coming down on me!  After the first song I asked Corey how many were left.

"Ummm, 28?"

"But this ONE song has been 25 minutes!!"

"Yeah....do you wanna go?"

"No.  No, no, no, no, no.  You want to stay.  We can stay, we can stay, we can stay."

"We'd better go."

"OKAY."

I felt bad that Corey couldn't stay.  And with mouthfuls of pizza and burritos I said as much.  Through mouthfuls of pizza and hamburgers he said it was ok.  And together with mouthfuls of burritos and pizza and hamburgers we wondered why were we eating so much food right now??

So long story not-so-short, I can't do concerts.  They make me feel like my life is coming to an endrightnow.  What I can do and will gladly do are flannel jammies, milkshakes and Matlock reruns.  And for that I have no shame.

Just another crazy dog lady

I'm a dog person.

A weirdo dog person; one who stops strangers to pet the iddy-biddy long haired chihuahuas they're carrying deep down inside their coats even if it means invading some serious personal space.

And I would expect the same if I had somehow managed to strap my 80 pound Golden somewhere onto my person.

Which I cannot.

I have tried.

Also as a dog person I allow myself to become as tiny as possible when I sleep so that my poor aging Oliver has room to stretch out on the bed when we retire for the evening.  After a few minutes of wrestling for position and covers and then fighting off nose jabs to my face we end up like this:

Oh the things we do for our D-O-Gs. 

Car accidents and colonoscopies, they go hand in hand

First I would like to say I did not realize how close we are to Christmas, not that this adds any additional stress, I just can't believe every single year it's like BAM.  Christmas is here.

Second, I got into a car accident last week and even though I'm fine I still want to talk about it.

And if we have time maybe we should start a dialogue on how I can transition better.  Mmmkay.

So this accident.  Yeah.  Last Tuesday I found myself hanging out on a telephone guidewire after someone turning left from the opposite lane didn't see me coming.  These things happen so fast. 

It wasn't a very complicated accident: there was a break in one lane of traffic and she tried to rush a turn into my lane.  I was right there so she hit me on my driver's side near my front wheel and pushed me right over the curb.  I was still going forward so I ended up on the guidewire.

Guidewires have a little more give than solid wood telephone poles; it was a soft landing.

We both were fine, I mean aside from our stomachs being lodged in our throats.

Those crazy nerves.

Our cars, however....no.  They were not fine.

Actually, I don't know what happened to her car.  She seemed to have some fender damage but I didn't stick around to chat about it.  I followed my car out on the tow truck.

It's funny how one second you can be driving along, singing your favorite Mariah Carey Christmas song, and then the next be sitting on the side of the road with your bumper clinging to life while you frantically dig through your glove compartment wondering why you didn't keep your registration and proof of insurance together so they'd be easier to find in the mess of fliers and napkins and receipts from your last four oil changes.

Fortunately, besides the obvious negative aspects of being in a car accident:

• $6,000 in damages
• horrible, horrible deductible to be paid six days before Christmas
• slightly stiff neck
• nervous that every car in the world is going to find a way to hit me

I have noticed a few positives:

• surprise day off the next day!
• Corey got my favorite pizza and two desserts!
• all of the mechanisms on one of my front wheels will have to be completely replaced, which means there is a 50% chance the squeak I hear from up front when I make right turns will be gone!
• I get new engine parts!
• my rental car has new fancy technology that lets me lock, unlock, and start without taking the keys out of my purse!

The whole experience was a little traumatic, it was my first real accident (I don't include my sister backing into me in the driveway or my other sister's clueless co-worker bumping me and then trying to tell her dad it was my fault), but so far it hasn't been an entirely negative experience.

If this is how I respond to nearly totaling my car I wonder how I'll feel about colonoscopies....